Task Difficulty and Gender Differences in Competitiveness: Evidence From Botswana
通过博茨瓦纳的实验，研究任务难度如何影响男女参与竞争的意愿，发现简单任务下性别差距更大，对理解劳动力市场性别差异有参考价值。
ABSTRACT Using a novel subject pool from Botswana, we experimentally examine the impact of task difficulty on willingness to compete, an economic indicator that may partially explain gender disparities in the labour market. Our experiment closely follows the paradigm of Niederle and Vesterlund (2007, QJE) and is concerned with treatments where a task is either relatively easy or more difficult. We report evidence of a larger gender gap in willingness to compete when the math task is easy in comparison to when the math task is more difficult. Our results have implications for future experiments examining gender differences.