How Can We Induce More Women to Competitions?

TL;DR

This paper explores how social image concerns influence women's participation in competitions and demonstrates that prosocial incentives can effectively encourage women to compete, even under public observability.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical model showing prosocial incentives can mitigate social image costs and provides experimental evidence supporting this approach.

Findings

Prosocial incentives increase women's willingness to compete.

Public observability reduces women's participation due to social image concerns.

Prosocial incentives remain effective under public observability.

Abstract

Why women avoid participating in a competition and how can we encourage them to participate in it? In this paper, we investigate how social image concerns affect women's decision to compete. We first construct a theoretical model and show that participating in a competition, even under affirmative action policies favoring women, is costly for women under public observability since it deviates from traditional female gender norms, resulting in women's low appearance in competitive environments. We propose and theoretically show that introducing prosocial incentives in the competitive environment is effective and robust to public observability since (i) it induces women who are intrinsically motivated by prosocial incentives to the competitive environment and (ii) it makes participating in a competition not costly for women from social image point of view. We conduct a laboratory experiment where we randomly manipulate the public observability of decisions to compete and test our theoretical predictions. The results of the experiment are fairly consistent with our theoretical predictions. We suggest that when designing policies to promote gender equality in competitive environments, using prosocial incentives through company philanthropy or other social responsibility policies, either as substitutes or as complements to traditional affirmative action policies, could be promising.