Does Unfairness Hurt Women? The Effects of Losing Unfair Competitions

Piasenti, Stefano; Valente, Marica; van Veldhuizen, Roel and Pfeifer, Gregor (14. July 2023): Does Unfairness Hurt Women? The Effects of Losing Unfair Competitions. Collaborative Research Center Transregio 190, Discussion Paper No. 410

Abstract

How do men and women differ in their persistence after experiencing failure in a competitive environment? We tackle this question by combining a large online experiment (N=2,086) with machine learning. We find that when losing is unequivocally due to merit, both men and women exhibit a significant decrease in subsequent tournament entry. However, when the prior tournament is unfair, i.e., a loss is no longer necessarily based on merit, women are more discouraged than men. These results suggest that transparent meritocratic criteria may play a key role in preventing women from falling behind after experiencing a loss.

• Item Type: Paper
• Keywords: competitiveness; gender; fairness; machine learning; online experiment
• Faculties: Economics > Collaborative Research Center Transregio "Rationality and Competition"
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
• JEL Classification: C90, D91, J16, C14
• Language: English
• DFG: Gefördert durch die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - 280092119