Backlash against women in competition

Last registered on December 10, 2021

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Backlash against women in competition
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0008634
Initial registration date
December 07, 2021

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
December 10, 2021, 11:04 AM EST

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Primary Investigator

Affiliation
Vienna University of Economics and Business

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Affiliation
University of Stavanger
PI Affiliation
WU Vienna University of Economics and Business

Additional Trial Information

Status
In development
Start date
2021-12-09
End date
2022-12-16
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial is based on or builds upon one or more prior RCTs.
Abstract
The gender pay gap remains persistent in most developed countries and a large proportion of the gap cannot be explained by observable factors. The repeated finding that women compete less than men has been suggested as a possible factor contributing to the lower wages of women and policy measures have been implemented to encourage women to enter more highly-competitive, well-paid, and often male-stereotypical careers. However, literature on backlash against agentically acting women suggests that women who choose to compete in male-typed domains may receive punishment for breaking social norms. With this experiment we investigate how people respond to income inequalities arising from competition between men and women when competition is voluntary and competitors act agentically.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Haeckl, Simone, Jakob Möller and Anita Zednik. 2021. "Backlash against women in competition." AEA RCT Registry. December 10. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.8634-1.0
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Intervention Start Date
2021-12-09
Intervention End Date
2021-12-22

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Amount of the winner's payoff redistributed to the loser (“transfer”).
Proportion of redistributors transferring 0 from the winner of the competition to the loser.
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
We define “transfer” as the actual amount transferred to the loser (0 <= transfer <=6). The outcome variables are directly elicited through the experiment.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
Our experiment design is closely aligned with Cappelen, Falch, and Tungodden (2019), henceforth CFT, and builds upon a previous experiment which was preregistered in December 2020 (Haeckl, Möller, and Zednik 2020).

Setup
Our study consists of two experiments: the workers experiment and the spectators experiment. For logistical reasons the spectators experiment will be conducted before the workers experiment.

In the spectators experiment the participant (spectator) is randomly assigned a pair of workers who both completed a knowledge task about sports and games. Of the two workers, the one who answered more questions correctly has earned £6 and the other has earned £0. The spectator learns the gender of the two workers and their earnings from the competition. Then the spectator chooses how much R in [0, 6] of the winner's earnings to redistribute to the loser.

In the workers experiment participants (workers) answer a quiz with 20 multiple choice questions about sports and games. Subsequently each worker makes choices about how his/her payoff is determined and has the opportunity to send one of two messages to the spectator who will decide about the workers' payoffs. The choice set for how the payoff is determined available to the workers varies based on the treatment.

The final payoff of the workers who competed is determined by the decision of a spectator. We therefore first collect the decisions of spectators. Subsequently, we conduct the workers experiment and match each pair of workers with a randomly selected spectator decision from the respective treatment. Spectators are told in advance that a subset of all spectator decisions is randomly selected to be applied to the payoff of participants from the workers experiment. All workers are told that, depending on their decisions, their final income may be determined by the decision of an impartial spectator.

Treatments
Each spectator is randomly assigned a pair of workers who competed against one another. Half of the spectators will be assigned a pair in which the loser is a woman; the other half will be assigned a pair in which the loser is a man. We conduct the following three between-subject treatments:

In the Mandatory Competition (MC) treatment we replicate CFT. Spectators redistribute incomes of workers who do not have a choice but are always matched with another worker for a competition which determines the workers' payoffs.

In the Voluntary Competition (VC) treatment spectators redistribute incomes of workers who have chosen the competition over a piece-wise payment scheme.

In the Selfish Competition (SC) treatment spectators also redistribute incomes of workers who have chosen the competition over a piece-wise payment scheme. In addition, the losing worker has decided to buy a sabotage coin for 10 Pence. This sabotage coin gave the worker a 50% chance to win the competition irrespective of his or her performance. However, the worker has lost nevertheless.

On top of these three between-subject treatments, we also conduct a within-subject treatment. After the initial redistribution decision described above, spectators are randomly sorted into either the High-Dominance Message (HDM) treatment or the Low-Dominance Message (LDM) treatment. In the HDM treatment, spectators receive a message from the loser which signals high dominance (and thereby is agentic). In the LDM treatment, the message sent by the loser signals low dominance. The message is displayed to the spectator after he/she has made an initial redistribution decision. After having received the message, the spectator has the chance to change the redistribution decision previously made. This way, we collect two redistribution decisions from each spectator, one made before and one made after having received a message from the losing worker.

Finally, we implement a veil of risk (Exley 2016; Coffman, Exley, and Niederle 2016) across all treatments. This means that all spectators are informed that, for any amount of money they choose to transfer from the winning worker to the losing worker, there is a 99% chance that the loser receives the money and a 1% chance that the money is lost, i.e. neither the winner nor the loser receives it.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
The randomization is done by a computer.
Randomization Unit
Randomization happens at the individual level.
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
5880 participants in the spectators experiment.
Sample size: planned number of observations
5880 participants in the spectators experiment. The sample contains participants between the ages 30 to 60 who currently reside in the UK. We stratify the sample to be balanced between men and women.
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
The spectators will be randomly assigned either a pair of workers with a male or a female loser and to either the MC, VC or SC treatment. This way, there are 1960 participants receiving each treatment, with an even distribution of male and female losers within each treatment. In addition, the spectators will be assigned to either the HDM treatment (2940 observations) or the LDM treatment (2940 observations). All spectators in the current experiment are treated with the veil of risk.
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
WU Competence Center for Experimental Research
IRB Approval Date
2021-12-07
IRB Approval Number
WU-HSRP-2021-018
Analysis Plan

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Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials