For
the first time in human history, women and men commonly compete side by
side. Most of the aggressive, ambitious, daring things we attempt to
accomplish are done together.
Many
recent findings in scientific research reveal gender differences –
differences in when they choose to compete, differences in risk taking
during competition, different responses to the stress of competition,
and different strategies for dealing with that stress. Men are quicker
to bond with teammates; women are more willing to befriend competitors.
Women are less rattled by being ranked, especially when that ranking
isn’t near the top. Men are overconfident of their abilities, while
women underattribute success to their own skills. Men get more
competitive under time pressure, while women get less competitive under
time pressure. Men rate their teammates and competitors lower in ability
– women rate them higher.
But these are all averages; they don’t
necessarily apply to any one man or woman. So the question remains
whether these average differences are truly meaningful, especially
compared to the broader spectrum of individual differences. Are those
scientists making a mountain out of a molehill here? Are the nuanced
differences in competitive style significant enough to actually be
helpful in maximizing their performance?
Working with this science
can feel like working with flammable compounds or radioactive
materials. Initially, we were very reluctant to entertain the line of
inquiry. But after years of careful study, and having interviewed the
scholars whose work is most compelling, we’ve come to conclude that some
of the research is simply too important to ignore.
In 2010, Tommy Sowers decided to run for Congress. The question was, from which district?
Sowers,
then a professor at West Point, had served two tours in Iraq; he had
been an Army Ranger and a Green Beret. Between going to college at Duke
and his various military posts, the decorated war hero had a number of
legitimate places he could call home.
Eventually, Sowers decided
on moving to his childhood home of Rolla, Mo.; he’d run as a candidate
for the state’s eighth congressional district. But the Eighth was likely
the most conservative congressional district in the nation. No Democrat
had won that seat in 30 years.
“There was just no talking him out of it,” recalled Democratic Party strategist Paul Begala.
But it wasn’t even close. Sowers only received 29 percent of the vote.
One has to ask: was this daring, or was it foolish?
All
over the country, there are candidates willing to take on such long
odds. But, like Tommy Sowers, they are almost all men. Even though
studies have shown that when women run for office, they raise just as
much money as men, and they win just as often as men – very few women
are willing to put their names on the ballot. According to Rutgers
University’s Center for American Women and Politics, only four women
filed out the forms for a gubernatorial run in 2012.
In fact, even
when you go down the food chain to survey the kinds of people who might
one day run for office in the future – lawyers, businesspeople,
community activists, educators – and you ask them if they’ve ever even
considered running, just contemplated it, men are 35 percent more likely
to have considered it.
The question is why. Elections are
intense, grueling competitions, held in public. Is there something about
competing that scares talented women away? That’s been the prevailing
theory. But new science – from a spectrum of domains inside and outside
politics – reveals that the real reason for the candidate-gap is gender
differences in how women and men judge risk.
Sarah Fulton, a
professor of political science at Texas A&M, surveyed 835 men and
women currently serving in their state legislatures, trying to see how
many of them were considering a race for a seat in the U.S. Congress.
She also asked them what their odds of winning were.
Analyzing the
state representatives’ responses, Fulton concluded that ambitious male
state legislators will run for Congress if they have
any chance to win. Ambitious female legislators will run for Congress if they have a
good chance to win.
The
tipping point seems to be around 20 percent odds. When the odds of
winning are below that, almost all the candidates will be men. When the
odds of winning are better than that, women jump in the race. In fact,
when the odds are decent, women will compete in the election even more
than men will.
A study of elected Texas judges confirmed Fulton’s
core finding. As did a study of New York state trial court judges. When
the odds are actually good, women will compete (by entering the race)
more than men. They just refuse to waste time with losing.
“I
was surprised that women were thinking so much more about the
probability of success as supposed to men,” said Fulton. “I’m not saying
that men are not strategic, but women are more responsive to the costs
and benefits. You could vary the chance of winning, but it isn’t going
to alter the men’s running all that much,” explained Fulton. “But for
women, it’s a really strong, steep slope. They’re extremely responsive
to the chance of winning.”
Fulton’s findings changed the paradigm
across all the social sciences. The ambition gap goes away, and even
reverses itself, if the odds of success are plausible. Men like Tommy
Sowers will gamble on impossible odds. Women won’t.
Perhaps this
helps explain the gender-gap in Silicon Valley, where among startup
employees, women are still outnumbered by men two-to-one, and only 4.3
percent of venture-funded companies are run by women CEOs. What if the
long-odds nature of technology ventures looks like a bad risk to most
women?
It appears that there is a gender bias to the typical
risk-reward calculus. Men tend to focus on the reward. The larger the
reward, the more they ignore the odds. Women are the opposite: they tend
to focus on the risk, and larger rewards are less relevant.
* * *
Stanford
economics professor Muriel Niederle has been interested in women’s
underrepresentation in business boardrooms since she was a high
schooler. She was in an advanced math track that was equally populated
by boys and girls. “But when they went to college, so many of the women
studied comparative literature or theater, while all the guys went to
engineering or math or physics,” she said. “I thought it was odd.” Were
women avoiding harder subject areas because they were more competitive?
When Niederle graduated from Harvard with her Ph.D. in economics, she
thought it would be an interesting phenomenon to research.
Niederle’s
body of research begins with a simple lab challenge. Reflective of her
own background, participants had to do some math. They were given sets
of five two-digit numbers to add. They had five minutes to get as many
done as possible. To make sure they worked hard at it, she paid them by
the set: 50 cents for each set completed. Men and women did equally
well, averaging about 10 sets completed and earning $5. (Each set took
about 30 seconds.)
Go ahead and try a set:
45
93
26
81
+ 69
———–
Later,
they get to do it again, this time in a room of four people all facing
the same task. This time, they had a choice. Did they want to be paid by
the set, like in the first round? Or did they want to make it
winner-takes-all? The pot would likely be $25 to $30.
Despite the
fact men and women had performed equally well in the previous round, a
staggering gap emerged. Seventy-three percent of men are game to play
winner-takes-all, but only 35 percent of women want to do it.
Niederle
has replicated this time and again, and now many other scholars use her
paradigm as well. “The data is so clear, the gap is so big,” Niederle
said.
At first glance, it looks like women are afraid of competing
in a win-lose situation. And in the thirty or so news articles
reporting Niederle’s work, that’s often been the headline. But think of
it rationally for a moment. You also have to take your own speed into
account. Yes, women are being a little cautious here, but unless you are
very fast at math and quite confident of your ability, your expected
return is higher being paid by the set.
For those 73 percent of men who want to enter the tournament, one of two things is going on in their heads:
1) They know they’ll very likely lose, but they don’t mind because they want someone else to get the $25 pot.
2) They are under the illusion that they have a good chance to win.
This
is not Lake Wobegon. Seventy-three percent of men are not above
average. Which means there are a lot of men who falsely believe they’re
going to win. It’s men who don’t really recognize the odds and are
overconfident. They mostly think about what they’ll win. Challenged to
compete, they can’t resist.
However, it doesn’t take much to get
women to compete more. In a recent study, the classic Niederle
experiment was replicated with MBA students. The only change in the
protocol was that right before doing the experiment, the MBAs were given
one of two short surveys. One survey asked about their gender and
family, and how many kids they had. The other survey quizzed them about
their professional plans – what was their expected salary after
graduation, et cetera. Women MBAs who took the family survey were
reluctant to compete. Women MBAs who took the professional survey had no
such reluctance. Even more of them wanted to compete than male MBAs.
To
get women to compete, they need to be in a social context where
competing is relevant to their success. When they choose to be overtly
competitive, women, it seems, are more attuned to the context than men
are.
* * *
When parents send
their children to elite schools, they’re often aware of the potential
downside: elite schools are competitive cauldrons. What if my child
isn’t quite up to it?
Northwestern University professor C. Kirabo
Jackson has discovered that girls handle the hothouse environment
differently than boys. Girls tend to thrive in these environments,
across the board, and the more elite the school, the better they do.
Not necessarily so for boys.
The
first piece of evidence came from his study in the small Caribbean
nation of Trinidad & Tobago. Jackson got the data on every
fifth-grader in the country in 2000. He then compared their fifth grade
scores on a national standardized test with their tenth grade scores. He
cross-referenced these scores against what school they had attended —
all the schools in Trinidad & Tobago are ranked, and these ranking
are widely published.
After he set up his models and ran all the
numbers, “I thought I must have made a mistake,” Jackson said. What he
found was boys and girls have different outcomes from attending elite
middle schools. “Boys seem to be more discouraged,” Jackson said.
Pointedly, Jackson noted that, for boys who went to the most elite schools, their math scores suffered. They would have
learned more math if they had gone to a slightly easier school.
Could
it really be true, Jackson wondered, that boys don’t handle the elite
competitive cauldrons as well as girls? Aren’t boys supposed to be more
competitive than girls?
Jackson started asking other researchers
if they were seeing a similar pattern – was anyone else finding that
boys were hurt by being in a more competitive environment? Papers
started coming in from around the world.
One study tracked 2,134
students attending an elite Chinese university. Chinese colleges assign
students to dorms: the same three or four people will share one very
small room for the entire four years of school. Researchers tracked
these quartets over time, and they found that the best-achieving woman
served as a “shining light” for her roommates. She pulled her fellow
roommates’ grades up over time. But the strongest male roommate had the
opposite effect; his presence seemed to drive down his roommates’ grades
year to year. Rather than being inspired by their high-achieving
dormmate, “Men seem to be depressed by their strongest peer.”
British
researchers have reached a similar conclusion, after looking at test
scores of 1.3 million children in the British public schools. The very
strongest boys, the “Top Five Percenters,” tended to have a negative
effect on other boys who rank below them. There was no such effect for
equivalent girls, who only got benefits from attending a very top school
with top students.
A fourth study had researchers from Harvard,
Yale and Dartmouth come together to follow kids who entered public
school lotteries for charter school spots. If you’ve seen movies like
“Waiting for Superman,” you know that these charter schools are supposed
to be saviors, the road to college. On the whole, their data was on
impoverished children in the American South. Just as you’d expect, girls
who won the lottery and attended their first-choice charter school
increased their odds of going to a four-year college. But boys who
lost
the lottery (and didn’t go to the charter school of their dreams) had
better odds of attending a four-year college than boys who won the
lottery.
That’s astounding. Something was going wrong during high school for many boys who attended these charter schools.
Looking at the papers together, Jackson saw that each confirmed the other. Around the world, a pattern was becoming clear.
“The
bottom line is, if you have a girl, I would put her in the best school
as possible and have her around the smartest peers possible,” Jackson
summarized. “If you have a son, you should put them in the school with
the brightest teachers, but you should be wary of putting him in a
hypercompetitive environment. Being a small fish in a big pond is
particularly bad for boys,” Jackson added.
This is not, as it
first seems, a failure to compete on the part of boys. It’s an example
of how the psyche gets worn down when you
overcompete – when people compete too much, always interpreting their world through the lens of winners and losers.
Boys
who fall behind find it difficult to ask for help, not wanting to admit
their troubles. Girls ask for help and get it, bringing them back into
the fold.
Most competitions are held over a defined period of time
– the 60 minutes of football. When the contest is over, competitors can
relax, leave it behind, and separate themselves from how well they did
in the game. In elite schools, this isn’t the case. The competition for
good grades is endless; the comparisons never cease. It’s not just a
game – it’s their life, with real outcomes.
As religious scholar James Carse explained,
finite games have a beginning, an end, and the goal of winning. Between games, there is recuperation and restoration.
Infinite
games, by definition, can never end, and, since no winner is ever
declared, the goal instead is to just to stay ahead. With infinite
games, there’s no rest – only a waxing and waning of competitive
intensity.
It’s in these infinite games, the evidence suggests, that women survive better than men. By
not always caring about winning and losing, they thrive. Their competitive style is more successful.
* * *
Let’s
go back to this finding that men tend to be overconfident and think
their odds of winning are better than they really are. It’s the lab
version of the decision to run for Congress being made by the state
legislators. Women are savvy about the odds, men are good at ignoring
the odds.
Do these optimistic biases show up elsewhere in the real
world? What about in an industry like Wall Street, where judging risk
accurately is the name of the game?
Women broke into Wall Street
in large numbers in the 1980s, when investment banks began recruiting
talent from the top colleges and business schools. These were high
prestige, high salaried jobs that the women were trying to nab. (In
2006, the average stock analyst on Wall Street made $590,000 a year.)
During
the 1980s, of all the financial analysts covering stocks, 8 percent
were women. This rose through the 1990s, and in 2001 it peaked at 20
percent. Since then, the percentage of female analysts has sadly fallen,
to 16 percent. Were women underperforming?
What if we told you
the opposite was the case – that female financial analysts have
statistically outperformed men, by a meaningful margin?
Dr. Alok
Kumar, from the University of Texas’s McCombs School of Business, became
interested in gender and financial projections when he read studies on
whether women CFOs are better than male CFOs at maximizing shareholder
value. They were, but the dataset was not large enough to be truly
conclusive. In search of a larger dataset, he went to the Thomson
Reuters’ Institutional Brokers Estimate System (I/B/E/S). This had every
financial earnings projection made by every stock analyst on Wall
Street from May of 1983 to June of 2006 – a total of 2,856,198 forecasts
issued by 18,292 analysts who covered 21,107 stocks. These were not
“Buy/Sell” ratings; they were projections of the earnings-per-share each
company would profit in future quarterly financial performance.
The first thing Kumar found was that women analysts outperform men: their projections are 7.3%
more accurate. Women
also do less “herding,” clustering near the industry average to avoid
being controversial and sticking out. All-in-all, women are actually
more bold in their predictions than men. And to top it off, they do all
this despite having fewer years of experience on the job.
Kumar
looked to make sure that women weren’t just outperforming in the
industry sectors where they make up a larger proportion of the analysts,
such as the Apparel/Clothing sector, where 40% of the financial
estimates were made by women. Stocks are normally categorized into 48
different industries. Of those, male analysts outperformed women in only
15 industries. Women analysts beat the men in 33 industries.
The
question Kumar was interested in started to change. If women were better
at financial estimates, did the market realize this?
Kumar
investigated how the market moves after a stock analyst revises his or
her earnings projection. Stock prices show more movement after a
revision from a woman – suggesting that the Street trusts female
analysts more than men.
Since Kumar’s research was published in
2010, variations of it have been reproduced in Europe, looking at
Buy/Sell recommendations. (The lesson: when a woman tells you to sell a
stock, listen to her.) Studies have also looked at when women are on the
audit committee, and when women are on a company’s Board of Directors.
The general pattern is that men drive a company to take more risk, but
women are more accurate in projections and are better at keeping
companies out of trouble.
It’s good to stay out of trouble –
especially for large companies – but being an entrepreneur is all about
taking risk. It’s sometimes hard to say whether these tendencies are a
good thing or a bad thing.
The open question remains – is all that
risk-calculation ultimately to women’s benefit? Of course, both men and
women do some sort of risk-reward calculation when deciding to enter a
competition. But it’s women who tend to focus on odds, and it’s men who
focus on what they’ll win.
Researchers have found that the more
people focus on their odds of winning, the less likely they’ll go for
it. But the more they focus on what they’ll win if they succeed, the
more likely they’ll go for it. People standing in line for Powerball
don’t think that their odds of winning are one in 195 million; instead,
they’re thinking about the $195 million they would take home. People who
write screenplays don’t think about the terrible odds (only 1 out of
every 363 registered scripts are purchased every year); they think about
seeing their story on the silver screen.
The Egyptian men and
women who took to Tahrir Square did not decide to act because they
believed in the likelihood of success: what pushed them forward was the
prize of freedom.
Maybe we need more Tommy Sowerses in the world.
Yes, Sowers’ race didn’t work out. But the odds didn’t really look any
better for Steve Jobs, and he did just fine. The world needs underdogs
who will take a fighting chance. If they dwelled on the odds, they’d
never do it.
One of Paul Begala’s favorite scenes in a movie is
from “Dumb and Dumber.” Jim Carrey’s character asks Lauren Holly’s what
are the chances of them having a relationship. “Not good,” answers
Holly’s character.
“Not good like – one in a hundred?” asks Carrey.
“More like –” Holly replies, “one in a million.”
Carrey takes this in for a moment.
Then he responds: “So you’re telling me there’s a chance.” And he screams with delight.
Excerpted from “Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing”
by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. Published by TWELVE books. Copyright
2013. Reprinted with permission of the authors and publisher.
For
the first time in human history, women and men commonly compete side by
side. Most of the aggressive, ambitious, daring things we attempt to
accomplish are done together.
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