Women Won Top Jobs More Often Than Men, and Earned Less for It

For decades, the same story has dominated research on workplace competition: women shy away from it. Lab study after lab study showed that when men and women go head-to-head on timed tasks, women enter competitive situations less often and sometimes perform worse under pressure. A new study is pushing back on that narrative.

When researchers replaced the usual timed math contest with a bidding process designed to mirror how people actually compete for jobs, women didn’t pull back. They competed just as hard as men, and they won top positions more often than their share of the participant pool would predict. Overall, most differences in how aggressively women and men bid were not statistically significant.

This doesn’t mean the gender gap in the workplace is solved, or even overstated. But it raises a pointed question: has science been measuring the wrong thing all along? The researchers behind the study, which appears in the journal Theory and Decision, think the answer might be partly yes, though they frame their findings as complementary to prior work rather than a refutation.

How Past Research on Gender and Competition May Be Missing the Point

Most of what economists know about gender and competition comes from a specific kind of lab experiment. Participants, often matched in small groups, are given a short, timed task, solving math problems, for example, and the winner takes all the prize money. Research has repeatedly shown that women are less likely to choose that format and sometimes perform worse within it.

Researchers argue that this setup, while valuable, captures only a narrow slice of how job competition actually works. In real organizations, moving up means investing in training, networking, putting in extra hours, taking on visible projects, and absorbing the general costs of trying to advance. None of that looks like a five-minute math sprint.

To model those real-world dynamics, the team designed an experiment where participants placed bids, essentially declaring how much they were willing to invest, to compete for positions in simulated company structures. No performance task. No speed test. Just strategic bidding.

Inside the Experiment That Changed the Picture

A total of 168 participants, drawn from both undergraduate and graduate programs, took part in the study at an experimental economics lab in Rome. About 45% were women and 55% were men.

Participants were placed in groups of eight and organized into two simulated companies: one with a relatively flat pay structure and one with a larger gap between the top job’s pay and the lower ones. Within those companies, participants submitted bids for the top position and for middle-level positions. A higher bid improved the odds of landing a job, but it did not directly determine the winner’s cost. The price a winner paid was determined by the next competing bid, and take-home pay was the salary minus that price.

Each experimental group moved through two phases. In the first, participants competed only within their own group of four. In the second, all eight participants could bid for positions across both companies, opening up broader competition. Each group played through multiple periods, giving participants time to learn the system. Earnings, including a participation fee, ranged from nothing to 25 euros, with an average of about 12.30 euros.

After the bidding periods ended, participants completed a questionnaire covering basic demographics, personality traits, logical reasoning, and their willingness to take financial risks.

What Bidding Revealed About Women and Competitive Jobs

Going in, the researchers expected men to bid more aggressively, in line with prior research on competition and status-seeking. That prediction didn’t hold up.

Across most positions and phases, there were no statistically meaningful differences between how much women and men bid. Where a gender difference did appear, it pointed in the opposite direction from what was expected: women bid more than men for the top position in the flat-pay company. The researchers note this as an unexpected finding and caution that they identified it after the fact, not as a hypothesis tested in advance.

More telling was who actually won the top spots. On average, women won about 9.21 top positions across all 32 periods of the experiment, compared with about 6.95 for men, a gap that was statistically significant.

That greater success in landing top spots, however, did not translate into higher earnings. Winning a top position often meant paying so much to secure it that the salary advantage disappeared. Middle positions, counterintuitively, tended to generate better take-home pay because bidding was less aggressive and prices were lower.

As the authors put it, real-effort tasks and this kind of bidding approach “likely yield complementary insights on the same issue.”

What This Actually Means for the Gender Gap at Work

Researchers are careful not to overreach. They explicitly state that their results “should be interpreted only as taking some weight away from intra-personal factors as mainly responsible” for gender gaps at work, and that their study has “nothing to say about the effects of discrimination and similar obstacles to women’s advancement.” Institutional barriers, bias, and structural inequality fall entirely outside what this experiment was designed to test.

What the study does show is that how researchers measure competitiveness shapes what they find. A woman who hesitates to enter a five-minute, winner-take-all math contest in a lab may bid just as aggressively as any man when competition is framed as investing in a career. The science of gender and competition, it turns out, depends heavily on which version of competition is being studied, and that may be the most consequential takeaway from this research.

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