Experimental Design Details
To investigate the impact of a single-sex environment on the willingness to take a leading role, we recruited high school students from both single-sex and mixed-sex schools and randomly assigned them to either single-sex or mixed-sex groups to conduct the experiment.
The experiment consists of five parts. In the first part, participants are instructed to play four games - the math game, the Chinese game, the 9-square game, and the Greek-alphabets game - to earn points. The math and Chinese games consist of multiple-choice questions extracted from the standard test required for admission to high schools in Taiwan. In the 9-square game, participants are asked to choose two numbers from a square grid, the sum of which must equal 100. In the greek-alphabets game, participants are prompted to click the greek-alphabets button in a randomly assigned order.
In the second part of the experiment, participants are not only required to play the similar four games as in the first part. Still, they are also asked to disclose their willingness to lead their pre-assigned group and estimate their ranking within the group. To encourage honest responses, the participants are offered incentives, which are designed based on the incentive structure used in a study conducted by Born, Ranehill, and Sandberg (2022).
During the third and fourth parts of the experiment, participants are subjected to a standard risk preference task adapted from Holt and Laury's (2002) study and an Implicit Association Test (IAT). In the risk preference task, participants are presented with a list of multiple prices and must choose between a safer option and a more risky option. In the IAT, researchers investigate the association in their minds between gender and major by assessing participants' response times.
In the final part of the experiment, participants are requested to provide demographic information, which includes their academic grades in high school, gender, and preference for college majors.