Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Why Women Don’T Run: Experimental Evidence On Gender Differences In Political Competition Aversion, Jessica Preece, Olga B. Stoddard

Faculty Publications

Women's underrepresentation in leadership positions has been well documented, but the reasons behind it are not well understood. We carry out a field experiment to test a prominent theory about the source of the gender gap in leadership ambition: women's higher aversion to competitive environments. Using politics as a context for our study, we employ two distinct subject pools – highly politically active individuals and workers from an online labor market. We find that priming individuals to consider the competitive nature of politics has a strong negative effect on women's interest in political office, but not on men's interest, hence …