A recent literature emphasizes that gender differences in the labor market may in part be driven by a gender gap in willingness to compete. However, whereas experiments in this literature typically investigate willingness to compete in private environments, real world competitions often have a more public nature, which introduces potential social image concerns. If such image concerns are important, and men and women differ in the degree to which they want to be seen as competitive, making tournament entry decisions publicly observable may further exacerbate the gender gap. We test this prediction using a laboratory experiment (N = 784) that varies the degree to which the decision to compete, and its outcome, is publicly observable. We find that public observability does not alter the magnitude of the gender gap in willingness to compete in an economically or statistically significant way.

最近的文献强调，劳动力市场上的性别差异可能部分是由于竞争意愿上的性别差距所致。然而，尽管该文献中的实验通常调查在私人环境中竞争的意愿，但现实世界中的竞争通常具有更公开的性质，这引起了潜在的社会形象关注。如果这种形象的关注很重要，并且男人和女人在他们希望被认为具有竞争力的程度上有所不同，那么公开参加比赛的决定可能会进一步加剧性别差距。我们使用实验室实验（N = 784）测试了这一预测，该实验会改变竞争决策的公开程度和结果。