Gender, Behavior and Decision-Making seminar Janvier 2025

Nathan Barrymore is an assistant professor of business, government, and society at The University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. He is also a senior fellow at the Wharton ESG Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Barrymore studies how firms respond strategically to stakeholders and the performance results of these strategic decisions.

Abstract 

We investigate gender differences in ambition, which we conceptualize as a construct consisting of one’s aspiration level, or goal setting, and one’s striving to achieve that aspiration level, or goal pursuit. Using an incentivized online experiment with approximately 1,600 participants, we examine how men and women set and pursue performance goals in a word-puzzle task. We find no significant gender differences in either goal setting or goal pursuit, even after controlling for risk preferences, confidence, competitiveness, and conscientiousness, and across a linear incentive scheme and a quadratic one that allocates outsized rewards for achieving high goals. Our findings challenge the notion that men are more ambitious than women and suggest that gender disparities in outcomes in various contexts (educational, professional, etc.) stem from factors other than inherent ambition.