What this means:
- New behavioural economics research finds no overall gender gap in competitiveness when competition for jobs is studied using candidates bidding for positions rather than short, winner-take-all lab tasks.
- In the experiment, women and men generally bid similarly, and women won top positions significantly more often in this setting, even though their final earnings were not different from men’s.
- The study matters because older research often shaped the belief that women “shy away” from competition. This paper suggests the answer depends heavily on how competition is measured.
- The researchers are careful: this does not prove discrimination is the only barrier, but it does weaken the claim that women are absent from top roles because they simply do not want them.
- For workplaces, the implication is significant. If women are competing, organisations need to look more closely at promotion systems, sponsorship, evaluation, visibility, and bias rather than repeating tired assumptions about ambition.
Research on gender and competition: Women are no less competent
The latest research on gender and competition should make many workplaces pause for a second. For years, one familiar explanation has followed women around boardrooms, promotions and senior roles: women are less competitive, less likely to push for the top, and less willing to enter high-stakes contests. It has been repeated so often that it started sounding like common sense. This study suggests that common sense may have been far too comfortable.
A new paper, “Bidding for better jobs: an experiment on gender differences in competitiveness without a real-effort task,” takes a different route to studying competition. Instead of asking participants to complete a short, winner-take-all performance task, the researchers created a bidding environment that more closely resembles the dynamics of career advancement.
Participants competed for jobs with different salaries and positions, and their bids reflected the amount of effort, time, training, or resources they were willing to sacrifice to secure those positions.
That difference in design matters more than it may seem.
What the study actually found
The experiment ran across 32 rounds. Participants bid for jobs in flatter and steeper company hierarchies, first within smaller groups and later in a larger market. The bidding used a second-price system, a standard way to encourage people to reveal what they truly value rather than to play games with the process.
What came out of it was striking. The researchers found no large overall difference in competitiveness between women and men in this environment. Both women and men showed strong interest in middle and top positions. In some cases, especially in flatter firms, women were the ones making most of the highest bids for top positions.
Another detail makes the findings even more interesting: women won the top positions significantly more often, but there were no differences in earnings after accounting for the costs of getting there.
In other words, this was not a story about women holding back. If anything, it was a story about women showing up fully in the contest.
That does not mean the old research was “wrong”. The authors explicitly say that real-effort tournament studies and this bidding approach probably offer complementary insights, because they capture different kinds of competition. But it does mean we should stop acting as if a single narrow experimental setup had settled the question forever.
Why this changes the conversation
For a long time, the “women do not compete” story has quietly shaped workplace thinking. It appears in talent conversations, leadership pipelines, hiring logic and even casual office chatter.
“He went for it.”
“She probably did not want it enough.”
“He is more naturally competitive.”
“She may prefer stability.”
Those sentences have done a lot of damage.
This new study suggests that when competition is understood as the willingness to invest in advancement, rather than perform under a very particular type of short-term pressure, women look every bit as serious about getting ahead.
That should feel validating to many women who have spent years proving their capability while still being told, directly or indirectly, that they lack the appetite for seniority.
We have seen versions of this pattern before on Change in Content. In our piece on Why Women Lose Out on Senior Roles, the real issue was not a shortage of potential. It was a messy mix of visibility gaps, sponsorship deficits, cautious self-positioning and organisational systems that reward the already visible. The missing ingredient was rarely talent. More often, it was access.
The same pattern appears in S for Sponsorship: Why Women Still Miss Out on Career Advocacy, where we examined how women continue to receive less career advocacy than men do. If a woman is competing but not being backed, seen or moved into stretch roles, her ambition alone cannot fix the outcome.
If women compete, why are top roles still unequal?
This is where the study becomes especially useful. The researchers note that their experiment focuses on the supply side of the story: individual decisions and behaviour. It does not directly test the demand side: discrimination, bias, stereotypes or institutional barriers. Still, the authors say that if organisations are seeing gender differences at the top, the evidence from this experiment suggests that a lack of desire on women’s part is not a convincing explanation.
That is an uncomfortable conclusion for employers who prefer easy answers. Because if women are competing, then the harder questions return:
- Who gets tapped on the shoulder for the role?
- Who is perceived as “leadership material” before the evidence is even assessed?
- Whose confidence is read as authority, and whose confidence is read as attitude?
- Who gets strategic assignments?
- Who has room to fail once and still be considered promotable?
- Who is judged on promise, and who is judged only on proof?
These are not abstract questions. They decide careers.
Our article on Leadership Experience for Men and Women made a related point: reaching leadership and experiencing leadership are two different things. Women may enter the race, run hard, and even win positions, but that does not guarantee that the system treats them similarly once they arrive.
And then there is workplace culture itself. Workplace Issues and Career Progression for Women explored how bias, burnout, caregiving burdens, and poor cultures continue to distort professional outcomes. Competition does not happen in a vacuum. It happens inside systems.
There is also a hidden caution in the study
One of the most fascinating aspects of the paper is that top positions did not always produce the best net outcome. In some cases, the competition for them became so intense that the winners effectively bid away much of the advantage. The top salary looked attractive, but the price of getting there ate into its value.
That has a very real-world flavour.
Many women know this script already. The climb to the top can demand relentless availability, emotional self-management, proving loops, image calibration, networking labour, and sacrifices to time, family, and health. Sometimes the premium attached to the role looks impressive from the outside, but the personal cost underneath it tells another story.
That should not discourage women from aiming high. It should encourage employers to think more honestly about how careers are structured. A workplace cannot keep celebrating ambition while quietly designing senior success around exhaustion and exclusion.
What should organisations do with this insight?
First, they need to retire the lazy stereotype.
If a woman does not apply for a top role, it does not automatically mean she lacks ambition. And if women are underrepresented in leadership, employers should not default to the old “maybe they do not want it” argument.
Second, make advancement rules easier to read.
Transparent role criteria, published expectations, visible opportunities and fairer promotion processes matter. Earlier research cited in the paper also points to the importance of transparency and clear procedures in reducing gender gaps.
Third, stop treating sponsorship as optional.
Women often do the work, but not always the political work around the work. Organisations can change that by pairing performance with advocacy.
Fourth, look at how “competitive” behaviour is defined.
If only one style of ambition is rewarded, then many capable women will still be misread. Some compete loudly, while some compete steadily. Some compete through preparation, consistency and judgement. Workplaces that recognise only one script will continue to miss talent.
Finally, check your own pipeline stories.
If the same team keeps saying women are “not putting themselves forward” while women say they are trying, the organisation should investigate the system before diagnosing the women.
The Change in Content View
What makes this study powerful is not that it gives women a gold star for trying hard. Women did not need one more academic confirmation to know they are capable of competing.
What it does offer is a well-timed challenge to a deeply convenient myth.
The idea that women are absent from top jobs because they are less competitive has allowed too many organisations to stay intellectually lazy. It let systems off the hook. It made inequality look natural. And it shifted attention away from sponsorship, structure, evaluation and bias.
This research on gender and competition does not solve the leadership gap. It does, however, remove one more excuse.
Women are not standing outside the race because they are afraid of the track. Many are already running. The better question is whether workplaces are finally ready to judge the race fairly, recognise ambition in all its forms, and build a version of leadership that does not reward only the loudest story in the room.
That is where equity starts becoming real.
Editorial Note
This article is based primarily on the 2026 peer-reviewed study “Bidding for better jobs: an experiment on gender differences in competitiveness without a real-effort task”, published in Theory and Decision, and on Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University’s research summary of the same. The article interprets the study for a workplace and leadership audience. It is intended for informational and editorial purposes and should not be read as a claim that discrimination is the only barrier facing women at work. Multiple structural, cultural and personal factors shape real-world career outcomes.
Primary Sources
- Theory and Decision / Springer Nature — Bidding for better jobs: an experiment on gender differences in competitiveness without a real-effort task
- Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University — Women compete just as hard as men for top jobs, and win them more often, new research finds
