Women and Competition: Do Gender Differences Matter In the Classroom?

More economics in the news is good for economics instructors. At their best, stories with economic content can engage student interest. The linked New York Times story made a big splash today.

Two economists, Muriel Niederle: Department of Economics, StanfordUniversity and NBER, and Lise Vesterlund, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, experimented with competitive responses by males and females. Not surprisingly, they found a number of significant differences in the way men and women respond to competitive situations. Let them put their conclusions in their own words:

In this paper we examined an environment where women and men perform equally well, and where issues of discrimination, or time spent on the job do not have any explanatory power. Nonetheless we find large gender differences in the propensity to choose competitive environments. We feel that the effects we discover in the lab are strong and puzzling enough tocall for a greater attention of standard economics to explanations of gender differences that so far have mostly been left in the hands of psychologists and sociologists.

I want to use the conclusions of the Niederle and Vesterlund paper to tentatively explore the implications for teaching and learning in the economics classroom. Niederle and Vesterlund refer to women leaving science and engineering, thusly:

There is indeed evidence that, for example, the decision of women to quit sciences and engineering is not primarily due to ability. For example, a report entitled “Women’s Experiences in College Engineering” writes that “Many young women leave […] for reasonsother than academic ability. These reasons can include their negatively interpreting grades that may actually be quite good, diminished selfconfidence, or reluctance to spend all of their waking hours ‘doing engineering.’” (Goodman, Cunningham and Lachapelle 2002). The report mentions that many women that left mentioned negative aspects of their schools’ climate such as competition, lack of support and discouraging faculty and peers. Similar effects have been found by Felder et al (1994).

It seems therefore that decisions of women to remain in male-dominated areas are not driven by actual ability only. In natural settings issues such as the amount of time devoted to the profession, and the desire of women to raise children may provide some explanations for the choices of women.

These conclusions, you may recognize, are the similar to those that got Harvard President Larry Summers in trouble a couple of months ago. I applaud the fact that the paragraph immediately above is in the paper. However, the insights of Professors Niderle and Vesterlund don't address gender differences in response to teaching methods and styles.

What I'm getting it is that I'm still in the dark about how to create a classroom environment that appeals to female students and male students equally. The reason for raising the issue relates to my previous post on The Royal Economics Academy about the AEA's efforts to increase the number of women in the economics profession. Women students, at least in my classes, perform as well or better than the males. Nonetheless, the number of females moving on to economics majors and careers in economics lags behind what I would expect. I hate to end a post with a question, but I must. Why the gender difference?