Apparently, I compete like a woman!

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about how I rose to the challenge of competing in a team even though individual effort or competition does not bring the best out of me.

Now, it appears, economists have discovered that's how women do it. (Link found via The F-Word Blog)

Although the study looked at a contest of intellectual ability rather than physical, I thought about it and felt that in that field also, I would match the results found concerning women rather than those concerning men.

Here's what they found:

The economists conducted an experiment in which the participants had to answer maths problems as quickly as possible. Participants in teams decided whether they wanted to be paid according to the number of problems their two-person team answered correctly or whether they wanted to enter a competition against three other teams. Individual participants decided whether they wanted to compete against three other individuals.

The results highlighted huge differences between the genders:

• Even though men and women performed equally well on the task, 81% of men chose to compete as individuals compared with 28% of women.
• When participants competed in teams, the gender competition gap shrank by 31 percentage points to 22%, with 67% of men choosing to enter the competition compared with 45% of women.

The researchers suggested that this may affect not only business hiring and promotion strategies, but also political representation of women:

"It appears to be the case that women often opt out of entering these competitive environments," Pate said. "Importantly, while qualified women opt out, unqualified men opt in. As a result, the gender competition gap may result in organisations failing to select the most qualified leaders."

...

The findings also have significance for the world of politics. Women are much more likely to be active in politics in countries with party lists than in those where a single person is elected.

One thing occurs to me, though, which is to ask how much socialisation of women's roles and the appropriateness or otherwise of putting oneself forward based on gender, play into these tendencies? The researchers have shown that the phenomenon exists, but have not explained it. It's worth noting that, even in the two-person team game, less than half the women chose to compete, while 2/3 of men did.

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For me, the question is, how do I use this knowledge about my own tendencies to help me find a job?