Saving President Larry

Much to my surprise, John Tierney actually has an interesting column in todays NYT. It seems economists in Pittsburg did an experiment where they paid men and women to do calculations, first at a piece rate of $0.50 per and then in four person tournaments where the winner got $2 per correct answer and the losers nothing.

On average, the women made as much as the men under either system. But when they were offered a choice for the next round - take the piece rate or compete in a tournament - most women declined to compete, even the ones who had done the best in the earlier rounds. Most men chose the tournament, even the ones who had done the worst.

The men's eagerness partly stemmed from overconfidence, because on average men rated their ability more highly than the women rated theirs. But interviews and further experiments convinced the researchers, Muriel Niederle of Stanford and Lise Vesterlund of the University of Pittsburgh, that the gender gap wasn't due mainly to women's insecurities about their abilities. It was due to different appetites for competition.

He goes on to note that many occupations are structured as tournaments, where the winner gets a lot and the losers much less. Steven Leavitt, in his book Freakonomics cites crack dealing as a classic example of such an occupation. Street dealers make less than minimum wage, live with their mothers, and risk very adverse outcomes (such as sudden death) - but if they make it up the ladder a few rungs, they can do quite well. Are women underrepresented among crack dealers? I'm guessing yes.

There are good sociobiological reasons for believing that this kind of sex difference is innate and related to our different incentive structures in the reproduction game.

Larry Summers, as part of his penance, is spending $50 million to figure out how to attract women to science and engineering. Sean Carroll and the usual feminist suspects are performing various ritual ceremonies to the same end, but it seems to me that Mr. Tierney his economists might have told us the answer.

Academic physics is very much a tournament, with lots of ways to fall by the wayside, as Sean got to personally experience recently. It could just be that the reason women rarely reach the upper circles has less to do with ability or discrimination than it does with their unwillingness to play this silly game.

So there's your answer, Larry. If you want more women in the science game, you might want to change the rules in such a way as to increase security and decrease competition. I'll bet that won't come naturally to your capitalist economist's soul.