In our Alessandra Cassar and Mary L. Rigdon PNAS (2021) paper, "Prosocial option increases women's competitiveness" we provide evidence that women enter competitions at the same rate as men when the incentive for winning includes the option to share part of the rewards with the losers (i.e., when the incentive system is socially-oriented). Using an experiment (with N = 238 subjects from three laboratories), we find that about 16% more men than women choose to compete in the standard tournament; this gender gap is eliminated in the novel socially-oriented incentive treatment. While men’s choice to compete remains unchanged, around 52% in both conditions, women increase their entry rate from 35% in the standard tournament to 60% when the incentive includes a socially-oriented option.
Our data are from 3 laboratories: Chapman, Simon Fraser, and University of California, Santa Cruz. Subjects participate in 3 rounds with different payment schemes. They complete the matrix search task. We have gender, performance in round 1 under piece-rate, performance in round 2 under Tournament and their choice in round 3 of payment type. We also have a risk measure for each subject.
There is an accompanying Stata Do file to replicate the data analysis in Cassar and Rigdon PNAS (2021).