Gender, age, and attitude toward competition

Abstract A large body of literature has shown the existence of a gender gap in competitiveness and a handful of experimental works investigating the impact of age on this gap lead to inconclusive results. We propose an empirical investigation on that, which is based on survey data and complementary to experimentation. Using individual data from a very large survey (European Value Study on 48 countries from 1990 to 2008), we examine how age influences the gender gap in attitude toward competition. After confirming the existence of a strongly significant gender gap, we find evidence of a gendered effect of age on attitude toward competition. Attitude toward competition has a U-shaped relation with age for men with a least-negative view around 53 years but becomes more and more positive over age for women. We therefore observe a U-shaped pattern of the gender gap with age with a minimum around 60 years. Finally, we show that the gender gap and its change with age are sensitive to both individual and national gender stereotypes, suggesting influences of cultural factors.