For years, research on workplace competition has reinforced a familiar idea: women are less willing than men to compete. Many studies have reached that conclusion using timed, winner-take-all tasks, such as short math contests. But a new study suggests the picture may look very different when competition is designed to resemble how people actually compete for jobs.
Researchers led by Andrej Angelovski of Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University tested a different model. Instead of asking participants to compete in a timed performance task, they asked them to bid for positions in simulated companies. Participants essentially had to decide how much they were willing to invest to improve their chances of securing a job.
The results challenged some common assumptions about gender and competition.
A Different Way to Study Competition
Traditional experiments typically place participants in direct competition over a short task, with the winner receiving the largest reward. Researchers have repeatedly found that women are less likely to enter these contests and can sometimes perform differently under competitive pressure.
The new study's authors argue that this format captures only one type of competition. In the workplace, advancement can involve training, networking, taking on demanding projects, working longer hours, and investing time and resources to improve one's career prospects.
To better reflect those dynamics, the researchers created an experimental labor market in which participants competed for jobs through bidding rather than performance on a timed task.
How the Experiment Worked
The study involved 168 undergraduate and graduate students at an experimental economics laboratory in Rome. Approximately 45% of participants were women and 55% were men.
Participants were divided into groups of eight and placed into two simulated companies. One company had a relatively flat pay structure, while the other offered a larger salary difference between the highest and lower positions.
Participants could bid for top and middle-level positions. A higher bid increased the likelihood of winning a position, but the winner did not necessarily pay their own bid. Instead, the cost was determined by the next-highest competing bid. Final earnings were calculated by subtracting that cost from the job's salary.
The experiment took place over multiple periods, allowing participants to become familiar with the rules and adjust their strategies.
Women Did Not Bid Less
The researchers initially expected men to bid more aggressively, based on previous findings linking men with greater willingness to enter competitive situations.
That prediction largely failed.
Across most positions and experimental phases, women and men showed no statistically significant differences in their bids. In one case, women bid more aggressively than men for the top position in the company with the flatter pay structure, although the researchers emphasize that this result was unexpected and identified after the initial hypotheses were established.
The most striking difference appeared in the number of top positions won.
Across the 32 experimental periods, women won an average of about 9.21 top positions, compared with approximately 6.95 for men. The difference was statistically significant, meaning it was unlikely to be explained by random variation alone.
Because women represented only about 45% of the participant pool, their share of top-position victories was higher than their representation would have predicted.
Winning More Did Not Mean Earning More
There was an important catch.
Winning the most desirable positions did not necessarily produce the highest take-home earnings. Competition for those positions could become so intense that participants effectively bid away the salary premium attached to the job.
Middle-level positions often produced better net earnings because they attracted less aggressive bidding and therefore came with lower effective costs.
In other words, being willing to compete successfully for a prestigious position was not automatically financially advantageous.
The finding illustrates an important feature of competitive markets: the value of winning depends not only on the prize but also on the price paid to secure it.
What the Findings Say About the Gender Gap
The researchers are careful not to claim that their findings explain the gender gap in employment or pay.
The experiment did not examine discrimination, workplace bias, institutional barriers, unequal opportunities, or other structural factors that can affect women's advancement. It also does not invalidate earlier research showing gender differences in particular forms of competition.
Instead, the study suggests that researchers may be measuring different aspects of competitiveness depending on the experimental design.
A woman who is reluctant to enter a five-minute, winner-take-all math contest may still be highly willing to invest time, money, or effort to compete for a desirable career opportunity. These are different forms of competition, and behavior in one setting may not predict behavior in the other.
A More Complicated Picture of Competition
The study's broader contribution is not that women are universally more competitive than men. Rather, it shows that competitiveness is highly dependent on context.
When competition was framed as bidding for career positions, women generally competed at levels comparable to men and won top positions more frequently than their representation in the participant pool would suggest. Yet the financial rewards of those victories could be undermined by the intense competition required to obtain them.
The researchers therefore present their findings as complementary to previous work rather than a rejection of it.
The takeaway is straightforward: how researchers define and measure competition matters. A laboratory contest, a promotion, a job search, and a career investment may all involve competition, but they can produce very different behavior. Understanding gender differences in the workplace may require studying all of these forms rather than treating competitiveness as a single, fixed trait.