Gender Differences in risk, social, and competitive preference. Experimental evidence from Uzbekistan.

Most of the previous literature suggests that women are less competitive than men. However, I we hypothesize that women are as competitive as man when the incentive for winning equally matter for both genders. The option to share some of their winnings with other competitors may afford females benefit from rewards without suffering some of its potential costs. In this paper we conducted an experiment on 212 subjects and the results support our hypothesis. The gap in competitiveness between males and females vanishes when we allowed winners an opportunity to share some of their winnings. Overall, our work demonstrates that including socially-oriented rewards to otherwise identical winner-take-all incentive scheme may increase women’s competitiveness, which may be used to close the persistent labor market gender gap