Previous research in this category employed real-effort tasks, which often asked people whether they wanted to compete or withdraw from competing for a fixed amount of money; the competitions involved completing tasks in the lab in a short time.

“Women usually choose to compete less, but it’s a very peculiar type of setting,” says Andrej Angelovski, Associate Professor in Economics at the International Business School Suzhou, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), and corresponding author of the paper. The study was co-authored with Jordi Brandts from the Barcelona School of Economics, Spain, and Werner Güth from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Germany.

Unlike previous research methods, this study’s auction-style approach measures competitiveness by the extent to which people are willing to sacrifice to attain their target position.

How men and women compete

The auction, which lasts 32 rounds, asks the participants to bid for jobs with different positions and salaries. Participants submit bids in Experimental Currency Units (ECU), which were converted into real euros at the end of the experiment at a rate of 10 ECU = 1 euro. Their bid represents the maximum resources (i.e., effort, training, time) they are willing to sacrifice from a position’s fixed salary to secure it.

The experiment employs a “second-price” system, meaning that if someone won a bid, they would pay the second-highest bid in their group. The method was designed to encourage participants to bid their true valuation of a job. Ultimately, a participant's profit is the position's fixed salary minus the price, or, if they fail to obtain a job, a default payment of 50 ECU.

Participants were placed either in flatter companies, where there is no large salary difference between the bottom and top positions, or in steep companies, where there is a large salary discrepancy between levels. The study progressed from Phase 1, where small groups of four competed within their own firm, to Phase 2, where groups merged into a larger market of eight to compete for any available spot.

The findings are surprising; unlike in previous experiments, women behave just as competitively as men, if not more aggressively in some cases. “Now that we’ve changed how we study competition, we find the typical results no longer hold,” Dr Angelovski says. “We do not find a large difference in competitiveness.”

In general, both genders exhibit strong underbidding for top positions and a preference for middle positions in both flat and steep firms, with no major differences between men and women. However, most of the high bids for top positions in flatter firms come from women.

The sacrifice of getting to the top

The research highlights a counterintuitive finding: the top positions carry the highest salaries, yet competition for them is so fierce that the winners bid away almost the entire advantage. Once the cost of getting there is subtracted, the people at the top end up no better off, sometimes worse off, than those who settled for a middle position. Women are overrepresented among them.

While winners of middle positions consistently earn more than the 50 ECU benchmark, winners of the top position do not. This suggests that aggressive career striving for the absolute top spot can carry hidden economic costs that equalise or even diminish the financial benefits of the higher salary.

People's willingness to sacrifice for the top position was one of the experiment’s surprising findings. “There’s potential for income here, but competitiveness is so high it eliminates the income explanation,” Dr Angelovski explains. “We also remove status: we don’t tell anyone who won the position, so there’s no status gained from reaching the top. Nobody around you sees that you got to the top.”

Supply and demand factor

The experiment focuses solely on the supply side (i.e., individual decisions and perceptions) rather than the demand side (i.e., societal perceptions, discrimination, or institutional barriers). Many previous studies attribute the shortage of women in top positions to women being inherently less competitive than men; this study's results challenge that assumption. While it does not rule out every real-world barrier, it shows the shortage of women at the top is not explained by a weaker drive to compete.

“There’s an indication that if you are seeing gender differences in your company in terms of percentage of women in top positions, that is a relatively strong indication it’s not coming from the supply side – it is not because women do not want to get there,” Dr Angelovski says.