Affiliation:
1. Amalia R. Miller is the Georgia S. Bankard Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Virginia, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Ragan Petrie is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Texas A&M University and a Professorial Fellow in the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne. Carmit Segal is a Professor in the Department of...
Abstract
High-pay, high-status jobs are competitive and male-dominated and typically demand long work hours. The authors study the role of competition in producing the latter two outcomes using two field experiments. In the first, they find that paying tournament prizes for performance induces both men and women to work longer, but that men respond more than women to the high-prize tournament. In the second, men are more likely than women to choose tournament-based compensation over a wage rate for larger prizes. These results demonstrate that high-stakes workplace competition can fuel gender inequality both directly, because men are more likely to enter and win tournaments, and indirectly, by raising work hours, which hurts women who face greater time demands in household production.