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

We examine whether women and men of the same ability differ in their decisions to seek challenges. In the laboratory, we create an environment in which we can measure a participant’s performance level (high or low), where a high performance level participant has on average higher earnings from solving a hard rather than an easy task, and vice versa. After we identify each participant’s performance level, they choose the difficulty level (easy or hard) for the next two tasks (only one of which will be chosen for payment). Although there are no gender differences in performance or beliefs about relative performance, men choose the hard task about 50 percent more frequently than women, independent of performance level. Gender differences in preferences for characteristics of the tasks cannot account for this gender gap. When we allow for a sequential choice high performing women choose the hard task significantly more often, at a rate now similar to the decision of men. Such a sequential choice makes challenging choices easier when participants are either risk averse or uncertain about their ability. Our results highlight the role of institutional design in affecting choices of women and men, and the resulting gender differences in representation in challenging tasks.