Abstract:

Reducing existing gender gaps in the labor market remains an important policy goal. Such gender gaps are particularly prevalent in STEM fields and high-level positions such as CEO or professor, a phenomenon that has been referred to as the ‘leaky pipeline’. Part of the explanation of the leaky pipeline may lie in the way that men and women deal with experiences of failure. The road to success is paved with failures, and evidence from the psychological literature suggests that men and women may respond to failure in different ways (Ryckman & Peckham, 1987; Dweck et al., 1978). If this is true, it may explain why men persist after the latest failed job application or desk rejection (Shastry & Shurchkov, 2022), whereas women might throw the towel.

I conducted a three-round experiment in my course "Machine Learning", a typical STEM subject, where I invite male and female students to perform real-effort programming tasks and I invite them to compete. By comparing the competition choices of high- and low-performing students in this experiment, I am able to study gender differences in the ability to deal with adversity. The first round of my experiment showed that while male students took immediately the challenge, no female student entered competition. How to bring women from zero to hero in STEM? To better understand the mechanisms behind competition choices and to take individual ability into account, I performed two more rounds in the two consecutive months of my course. In a second round, I forced competition, namely, I required every student to take the challenge and solve the assigned problem set. Solving the problem set was a necessary condition to pass the course. After receiving their solutions, I gave feedback to the students, i.e. I told them their score and publicly announced their ranking. A month later, in a third round, I offered the possibility to compete again, similarly to what I did in the first round. My results showed that while every high-performer in the previous round took the challenge, regardless of their gender, only males took the challenge among the low-performers.

Summary of results. To begin with, I find strong evidence that students who "lose" competitions are less likely to enter subsequent competitions. Importantly, I find evidence that losing a competition has a demotivating effect especially on women (but not men).

These results show that other teaching strategy than pure competition are here necessary: in particular, group work, knowledge exchange among peers, and feedback. I will discuss these and other suggestions in my presentation.

Keywords:

STEM, gender gap.