two papers below show that men react to incentives and competition better than women. In general, women do worse when competing with men than when competing with each other. Its too little evidence to base wide ranging conclusions from but in general, this literature lends support to claims that majority male competitive environments are damaging to women's outcomes. however, it also provides evidence that the bluntening of competition in different walks of life might be harmful to young men's outcomes.
These papers, and others, increasingly indicate to me that competitive (even cash) prizes are needed to motivate young men in academic settings possibly because their brain is hard-wired to respond to this type of incentive or that they are simply not as future oriented as their female colleagues. Either way, the underperformance of men in college entry exams and in college itself throughout the world has received disproportionately less attention and its really worth looking at some policy mechanisms like this that might help to smooth potential time inconsistencies in human capital investment in men. Of course, its also possible that male college underperformance reflects a rational belief in the returns but this is not given wide credence.
http://www.stanford.edu/~niederle/Gender.pdf
http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/cheri/wp/cheri_wp95.pdf
becker and posner discuss some of this on their blog on March 2nd. Posner raises the declining influence of father's on boys as one potential generator with the idea being that divorce will remove the father from continuous presence with the children more than the mother thus leaving the boys without continuous reinforcement. Other reasons include the much debated suggestion that women, on average, are more intelligent but that males produce far more geniuses and far more at the other end of the distribution. Surprisingly, they dont mention the argument that males can find better outside options than women and this may feed through to their entire education investment.
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
1 comment:
My PhD work on the determinants of time useage among higher education students will allow myslef and Liam to investigate the gender breakdown of time spent on study, work, leisure and sleep. The specification of the models in this work is still preliminary, but initial results show that women spend more hours studying than men.
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