We examine how gender attitudes and performance under competitive situations in the lab reflect microenterprise outcomes in the renewable energy sector of Rwanda – a country with progressive gender policies despite its traditional patriarchal setup. We adopt the standard Niederle and Vesterlund (2007) experimental design in addition to a unique dataset from off-grid microenterprises, managed by entrepreneurs who were working in mixed and single-sex teams prior to the lab experiments. After a piece-rate and a tournament compensation schemes, participants are offered to the opportunity to choose their compensation scheme between these two options in a third round. We find that female entrepreneurs are not less likely to compete and are not outperformed by male entrepreneurs. This stands in contrast to several studies, mostly conducted on university students of developed countries. Furthermore, we leverage administrative and self-reported business data to show that the female entrepreneurs who chose to compete in the lab perform as well as their male counterparts, providing some external validity to our lab results.

我们研究了实验室竞争环境下的性别态度和绩效如何反映卢旺达可再生能源部门的微型企业成果。卢旺达是一个尽管实行传统父权制，但仍实行渐进式性别政策的国家。除了采用离网微型企业的独特数据集以外，我们还采用标准的Niederle和Vesterlund（2007）实验设计，这些数据集由在实验之前在混合和单性团队中工作的企业家管理。在计件工资和锦标赛补偿方案之后，在第三轮中为参与者提供了在这两个选项之间选择其补偿方案的机会。我们发现，女性企业家竞争的可能性不低于男性企业家，而且表现不逊色于男性企业家。这与多项研究相反，主要针对发达国家的大学生。此外，我们利用行政和自我报告的业务数据来表明，选择参加实验室竞争的女性企业家的表现与男性企业家相同，这为我们的实验室结果提供了一定的外部有效性。