Mary Rigdon, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor
Political Economy & Moral Science
 

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Gender Differences in Competitiveness: The Role of Social Incentives

The conventional view among economists has long been that the persistent wage gap is due to an underlying competitiveness gap: simply, women are less competitive than men and as a result, women pursue competitive careers at a lower rate than men, which would explain the wage gap since more competitive careers are more lucrative. Mary’s research challenges this narrative: women don’t have a lower desire to compete; they are motivated differently. As shown by her research, funded by the National Science Foundation and pursued with Alessandra Cassar, Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, if incentives are structured to reflect these motivational differences, women are just as competitive as men. Mary’s work sets out to change perceptions about the gender wage gap, help explain why it persists and, most importantly, explore how we can close it. In her talk, she will discuss the social incentives that close the gender competitiveness gap in several laboratory experiments and explore the implications of the results for mechanism design in the labor market.