Competing for the benefit of offspring eliminates the gender gap in competitiveness

Significance Despite Darwin’s recognition of the importance of intrasexual competition, the topic of female competition has been largely ignored. Economists, looking for reasons why women are rarely found in top jobs, have accumulated experimental evidence pointing to women’s lower desire to compete than men. Consistent with newer interdisciplinary hypotheses about female competition, our experimental results show that women can compete as much as men once we change the experimental reward medium to something more in line with women’s goal: the benefit of one’s children. Our results have important policy implications: a change in the workplace incentive structure could induce more women to enter workplace competitions. Such findings matter for a broader group of scientists including biologists, anthropologists, psychologists, economists, and sociologists. Recent advances have highlighted the evolutionary significance of female competition, with the sexes pursuing different competitive strategies and women reserving their most intense competitive behaviors for the benefit of offspring. Influential economic experiments using cash incentives, however, have found evidence suggesting that women have a lower desire to compete than men. We hypothesize that the estimated gender differences critically depend on how we elicit them, especially on the incentives used. We test this hypothesis through an experiment with adults in China (n = 358). Data show that, once the incentives are switched from monetary to child-benefitting, gender differences disappear. This result suggests that female competition can be just as intense as male competition given the right goals, indicating important implications for policies designed to promote gender equality.