The "competitiveness gap" may be a task-design artifact: in an auction, women bid hardest for the top

A bidding experiment published in Theory and Decision reports no overall gender gap in competitiveness, and where a gap does appear it is women who push hardest for the highest positions ^[1][4]. The interesting part is not the result but the instrument: the same construct, measured a different way, gives a different answer.

The canonical finding came from real-effort tasks, in which subjects completed timed tasks in a lab and were asked whether they wanted to compete for a fixed amount of money or withdraw ^[2]. "Women usually choose to compete less, but it's a very peculiar type of setting," says Andrej Angelovski of the International Business School Suzhou at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, the corresponding author, who wrote the paper with Jordi Brandts of the Barcelona School of Economics and Werner Güth of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods ^[3][4].

The replacement design measures willingness to sacrifice rather than willingness to enter ^[5]. Over 32 rounds, participants bid in experimental currency for jobs at different ranks and salaries, with 10 ECU converted to one euro at the end ^[6]. A bid represents the maximum resources - effort, training, time - a participant will give up out of a position's fixed salary to secure it ^[7]. Winners pay the second-highest bid in their group, a rule meant to make truthful valuation the best strategy ^[8]. Profit is the salary minus the price paid; anyone who wins nothing takes a default 50 ECU, which is five euros ^[9][10]. Some firms were flat, with little salary distance between bottom and top; others steep ^[11]. Phase 1 pitted groups of four inside one firm, then Phase 2 merged them into markets of eight, two firms' worth of candidates chasing the available slots ^[12][13].

Both genders underbid heavily for top positions and preferred middle positions in flat and steep firms alike, with no major gender difference; in the flatter firms, most of the high bids for the top came from women ^[14][15]. "Now that we've changed how we study competition, we find the typical results no longer hold," Angelovski says ^[16].

The finding operators should sit with is the price of winning. Competition for the top job was fierce enough that winners bid away almost the entire salary advantage, leaving them no better off, and sometimes worse off, than those who settled for the middle ^[17]. Middle-position winners consistently beat the 50 ECU outside option; top-position winners did not ^[18]. That happened with the obvious motives stripped out: "There's potential for income here, but competitiveness is so high it eliminates the income explanation," Angelovski says, noting that winners were never announced, so no status was gained ^[19]. Women were overrepresented among those top winners ^[17].

The caveats are structural. This is a supply-side study by construction, modelling individual decisions and perceptions rather than discrimination or institutional barriers ^[20]. The summary of the work does not give a sample size, a subject pool location, or effect sizes, so the magnitude of the female tilt in flat-firm top bids cannot be assessed from it ^[21]. The literature it contests has attributed the shortage of women in top positions to women being less competitive ^[22].

What to watch: whether the no-gap result holds up when others run the auction design with different populations and larger stakes, and whether anyone tries to reconcile the two instruments rather than picking the one they like. The second thing to watch is the rent dissipation. If the premium attached to a top rung is bid away in effort and training before anyone arrives, the winner captures little and the employer is paying for sorting, not output. That is a statement about a lab auction until someone measures it in a real promotion ladder.