From Micro to Macro Gender Differences: Evidence from Field Tournaments

José De Sousa () and Guillaume Hollard

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: We document that women compete worse against men in field tournaments in over 150 countries and across all ages. Our field setting is the game of chess and we benefit from a large and rich dataset to investigate the robustness and heterogeneity of our uncovered gender differences in competition. We find a macro gender gap in every country: there are fewer female than male players, especially at the top, and women have lower average rankings. Moreover, comparing millions of individual games, we find a small but robust micro gender gap: women's scores are about 2% lower than expected when playing a man rather than a woman with an identical rating, age and country. Using a simple theoretical model, we show how this small micro gap may affect women's long-run human-capital formation. By reducing effort and increasing the probability of quitting, both effects accumulate to explain a larger share of the macro gap.

Keywords: macro gender gap; micro gender differences; under-representation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-spo
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03389151v2
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03389151v2/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: From Micro to Macro Gender Differences: Evidence from Field Tournaments (2023)
Working Paper: From Micro to Macro Gender Differences: Evidence from Field Tournaments (2023)
Working Paper: From Micro to Macro Gender Differences: Evidence from Field Tournaments (2023)
Working Paper: From Micro to Macro Gender Differences: Evidence from Field Tournaments (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03389151

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().