We examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task, first under a non-competitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance, men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance. While seventy-three percent of the men select the tournament only thirty-five percent of the women make this choice. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only play a negligible role. Instead the tournament-entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition. The result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it. * We thank Scott Kinross, who conducted all the experiments reported in this paper, for his excellent research assistance. We thank the editors and the referees who helped us improve the paper. We also

Recent research documents that while men are eager to compete, many women, even high performing ones, often shy away from competition. We examine experimentally whether affirmative action can entice more women to compete. When women are guaranteed equal representation among winners, we find that more women and fewer men enter competitions, and the response is larger than predicted by changes in the probability of winning. An explanation is that under affirmative action the competition becomes more gender specific and this causes both beliefs on rank and attitudes towards competition to change. The changes in competitive entry affect the costs of affirmative action. Based on ex-ante entry affirmative action is predicted to lower the performance requirement for women and result in reverse discrimination towards men. Interestingly this need not be the case when entry is not payoff maximizing, in fact it may not be necessary to lower the performance requirement for women to achieve a more diverse set of winners. We are grateful to the NSF and the Harvard Business School for generous support. We thank the

This paper examines the engagement patterns of male and female undergraduates in different types of baccalaureate-granting institutions. Descriptive statistics and hierarchical linear modeling show that on balance, undergraduate women participate more frequently than their male counterparts in educationally purposeful activities. Male first-year and senior students devote less time and effort to academic challenge tasks, such as working hard to meet expectations and spending time studying; senior males also participated less often in active and collaborative learning activities. Institutional type is unrelated to gender differences in engagement. The results point to areas where institutions could focus efforts to enhance the quality of the undergraduate experience for all students. 2 The Relationship between Gender and Student Engagement in College For more than a quarter century, undergraduate women have outnumbered their male counterparts at U.S. colleges and universities (U.S. Department of Education, 2001; Peter & Horn, 2005). Although the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to men has increased during this period (King, 2006), undergraduate enrollment at most baccalaureate-granting institutions is

This study was designed to investigate a phenomenon, persistence of undergraduate women in their engineering majors, from a qualitative paradigm. Guided by the tenets of feminist and inclusive research, the assumption was made that all women, whether they persist or not in their engineering majors, have strengths and insights into their own personal experiences. The experiences of African American women, Asian women, Caucasian women, Hispanic women, women from rural geographical areas, and non-persisters were investigated. A developmental lifespan and social learning perspective called for an examination of factors relevant to engineering major choice and persistence from early childhood to the present time, including family background and individual factors, environmental factors and experiences with the engineering culture, and social factors relevant to major choice and persistence. Twenty-eight (28) persisters and 8 nonpersisters participated in the study which was conducted at a large land-grant university in the southeastern United States in the fall of 1996. The following questions guided the study: (1) What experiences have been influential in undergraduate women’s selection of engineering as a major? (2) How does the culture and climate of engineering education influence the experiences of these undergraduate women? (3) How do

“NSSE is an institution’s most trustworthy lens for seeing deeply into the quality of students’ experiences. Its results translate directly into plans for action and strategies of reform and transformation.” — �Lee S. Shulman, President, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching