The Center for Economics & Public Policy, Department of Economics and Center for Demographic & Social Analysis present

"Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices"
with Muriel Niederle, Stanford University

Tuesday, April 2, 2013
3:30-5:00 p.m.
Social Science Plaza A, Room 2112

Gender differences in competitiveness are often discussed as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes. Niederle correlates an incentivized measure of competitiveness with an important career choice of secondary school students in the Netherlands. At the age of 15, these students have to pick one out of four study profiles, which vary in how prestigious they are. While boys and girls have very similar levels of academic ability, boys are substantially more likely than girls to choose more prestigious profiles. Niederle and co-authors find that competitiveness is as important a predictor of profile choice as gender. More importantly, up to 23 percent of the gender difference in profile choice can be attributed to gender differences in competitiveness. This lends support to the extrapolation of laboratory findings on competitiveness to labor market settings.

Paper: Buser, Thomas, Muriel Niederle and Hessel Oosterbeek, “Gender, Competitiveness and Career Choices,” November, 2013

This talk is part of the Population, Society and Inequality (PSI) Spring 2013 Colloquium Series.

For further information, please contact Sandy Cushman, scushman@uci.edu or 949-824-3344.