1 Gender Differences in Attitudes Towards Competition: Evidence from the Italian Scientific Qualification

We rely on a natural experiment involving the Italian promotion system for associate and full professor positions to investigate gender differences in competitive behavior. After controlling for productivity and a number of individual and field characteristics, we find that females have a lower probability of entering into competition of about 4-5 percentage points. This gap becomes larger in fields in which women are under-represented. The attitude to shy away from competition is peculiar to women in the lower tail of the distribution of scientific productivity, while females in the upper tail behave similarly to males. We also find that conditional on entering into the competition, females are as likely as males to be promoted