Emirati women do not shy away from competition: evidence from a patriarchal society in transition

Aurelie Dariel
Curtis Kephart
Nikos Nikiforakis
Christina Zenker

ORCID Identifiers

0000-0001-5159-1988

Document Type

Article

Source of Publication

Journal of the Economic Science Association

Publication Date

11-30-2017

Abstract

We explore gender attitudes towards competition in the United Arab Emirates—a traditionally patriarchal society which in recent times has adopted numerous policies to empower women and promote their role in the labor force. The experimental treatments vary whether individuals compete in single-sex or mixed-sex groups. In contrast to previous studies, women in our sample are not less willing to compete than men. In fact, once we control for individual performance, Emirati women are more likely to select into competition. Our analysis shows that neither women nor men shy away from competition, and both compete more than what would be optimal in monetary terms as the fraction of men in their group increases. We offer a detailed survey of the literature and discuss possible reasons for the lack of gender differences in our experiment.

ISSN

2199-6784

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Volume

3

First Page

121

Last Page

136

Disciplines

Social and Behavioral Sciences

Indexed in Scopus

no

Open Access

yes

Open Access Type

Green: A manuscript of this publication is openly available in a repository

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