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Emirati women do not shy away from competition: evidence from a patriarchal society in transition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Aurelie Dariel ,
Curtis Kephart ,
Nikos Nikiforakis Open the ORCID record for Nikos Nikiforakis [Opens in a new window]  and
Christina Zenker
Aurelie Dariel
Affiliation:
Division of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, P.O. Box 129188 Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Curtis Kephart
Affiliation:
Division of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, P.O. Box 129188 Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Nikos Nikiforakis*
Affiliation:
Division of Social Science, New York University Abu Dhabi, P.O. Box 129188 Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Christina Zenker
Affiliation:
College of Business, Zayed University, P.O. Box 144534 Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

We explore gender attitudes towards competition in the United Arab Emirates—a traditionally patriarchal society which in recent times has adopted numerous policies to empower women and promote their role in the labor force. The experimental treatments vary whether individuals compete in single-sex or mixed-sex groups. In contrast to previous studies, women in our sample are not less willing to compete than men. In fact, once we control for individual performance, Emirati women are more likely to select into competition. Our analysis shows that neither women nor men shy away from competition, and both compete more than what would be optimal in monetary terms as the fraction of men in their group increases. We offer a detailed survey of the literature and discuss possible reasons for the lack of gender differences in our experiment.

Keywords

GenderCompetitionCultureInstitutions

JEL classification

J31: Wage Level and Structure • Wage Differentials C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior M52: Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects C70: General J24: Human Capital • Skills • Occupational Choice • Labor Productivity J16: Economics of Gender • Non-labor Discrimination
Type
Original Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , December 2017 , pp. 121 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Economic Science Association 2017

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-017-0045-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

We would like to thank the Guest Editor, two anonymous reviewers, and Bob Slonim for valuable comments, Loukas Balafoutas and Ernesto Reuben for valuable discussions, as well as faculty members at Zayed University who gave us their classes to run our experiment. All aspects of the experiment were approved by the IRB at NYU Abu Dhabi (#024-2016) and Zayed University (#ZU16_013_F).

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