Gender differences in competitive preferences: new cross-country empirical evidence

Abstract

This article provides new empirical evidence on gender differences in competitive preferences using a representative data set of more than 25 000 individuals from 36 countries. The empirical results show that the gender differences in competitive preferences are statistically significant in almost all countries, with women having, on average, a lower preference for competitive situations than men. Although relatively substantial in most countries, the magnitude of gender differences varies considerably between countries. Results of a regression analysis suggest that the gender differences persist even when controlling for a number of potentially relevant variables. Furthermore, gender differences among adult men and women are hardly affected by the stage of life cycle.

Keywords:

• competitive preferences
• gender differences
• cross-country study
• large-scale data set

JEL Classification:

• J16
• J20

Notes

¹ More information about the method of the survey can be obtained from the Analytical Report of the Flash EB Entrepreneurship 2009 (http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/flash/fl_283_en.pdf).

² For instance, the behavioral relevance of self-reported risk preferences was tested by Dohmen et al. (2011), who found that the score of a general risk question is the best all-round predictor of actual risk-taking behavior.

³ If the distributions of competitive preferences of men and women are very similar to each other, the index will be near to 0, whereas it will be near to 1 if the distributions are very different from each other. However, the index is unlikely to be close to 1, since responses are made on a 4-point scale. Hence, there is always an overlap of male and female distributions, unless all men score high (low) and all women score low (high).

⁴ These results are confirmed by ordered probit regressions where competitive preference enters as an ordinal dependent variable.