Battle of the Sexes? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Gender Differences in Competitiveness and Pay (Faculty Colloquium)

This study illustrates the impact of employees’ preferences for competitiveness on gender pay gaps, highlighting differences between variable and base pay as well as variations across countries. Based on survey and human resource data on 6,746 employees from a large multinational firm, our analyses produce three main results: First, we show that competitiveness explains 5.47 percent of the unadjusted and 3.17 percent of the adjusted gender gap in total pay. Second, results reveal that competitiveness contributes more strongly to gender gaps in variable pay than base pay, suggesting that higher managerial discretion in variable pay exacerbates gender biases in favor of more competitive employees. Third, we show that in highly gender-equal countries, competitiveness has a greater effect on pay and gender pay gaps, indicating that competitiveness is used as a differentiator in pay especially when access to social and economic resources is equal.

Speaker:
Stephan Müller holds a PhD in Economics (2015) from the University of Kassel. Before joining Bard College Berlin, he was a post doctoral fellow at the Chair of Microeconomics at the University of Göttingen. His research has been published in a number of journals including: Management Science, Theoretical Economics, Journal of Public Economics, European Economic Review, and Games and Economic Behavior.

Part of the Fall 2024 Faculty Colloquium series.

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For more information, e-mail [email protected].

Time: 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm CET/GMT+1

Location: SR 8 (P24)

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