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

Fifty years of intensive search have yet to identify scientifically useful non-linear utility functions. Even complex functions with many free parameters do a poor job of predicting individual behavior in out-of-sample data, in new tasks and in new contexts. At the population level, socioeconomic and demographic data exhibit little power to explain variations in the curvature of estimated utility functions (risk preferences). There is no consensus even on the cross-sectional distributions of risk preference parameters. Qualitative accounts of macroeconomic phenomena, financial markets, insurance, and gambling, the traditional justifications for non-linear utility functions, have not led to quantitative work of practical value. The absence of scientifically useful evidence on curved utility functions suggests the merits of returning to the roots of choice theory. Placing the explanatory burden on potentially observable opportunity sets offers a simpler and more robust approach to understanding behavior under risk. Analysis of net payoff opportunities, including embedded options and other interactions with existing obligations, permits a parsimonious analysis of risky choice using only expected value, i.e., a linear utility function.

There is considerable evidence that males are more prone to take risks than females. This difference has implications for rates of promotion in hierarchies where promotion is based on random signals of ability. I explore the promotion consequences of three types of performance standards: gender-blind standards, standards designed to promote agents of equal ability on average, and standards designed to promote equal numbers of both genders. These three objectives lead to different promotion standards, which highlights among other things that the goal of affirmative action is not well defined. Lower promotion standards for females can be necessary to ensure either equal abilities or equal numbers in the promoted populations.