TY - JOUR AU - Niederle,Muriel AU - Segal,Carmit AU - Vesterlund,Lise TI - How Costly is Diversity? Affirmative Action in Light of Gender Differences in Competitiveness JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 13923 PY - 2008 Y2 - April 2008 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13923 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13923.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Muriel Niederle Department of Economics 579 Serra Mall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-6072 Tel: 650/723-7359 Fax: 650/725-5702 E-Mail: niederle@stanford.edu Carmit Segal Department of Economics University of Zurich Winterthurerstrasse 30 CH - 8006 Zurich Switzerland Tel: (+44) 44-634- 5933 E-Mail: carmit.segal@gmail.com Lise Vesterlund Department of Economics University of Pittsburgh 4916 Posvar Hall Pittsburgh, PA 15260 Tel: 412/648-1794 Fax: 412/648-1793 E-Mail: vester@pitt.edu AB - Recent research documents that while men are eager to compete, women often shy away from competitive environments. A consequence is that few women enter and win competitions. Using experimental methods we examine how affirmative action affects competitive entry. We find that when women are guaranteed equal representation among winners, more women and fewer men enter competitions, and the response exceeds that predicted by changes in the probability of winning. An explanation for this response is that under affirmative action the probability of winning depends not only on one's rank relative to other group members, but also on one's rank within gender. Both beliefs on rank and attitudes towards competition change when moving to a more gender-specific competition. The changes in competitive entry have important implications when assessing the costs of affirmative action. Based on ex-ante tournament entry affirmative action is predicted to lower the performance requirement for women and thus result in reverse discrimination towards men. Interestingly this need not be the outcome when competitive entry is not payoff maximizing. The response in entry implies that it may not be necessary to lower the performance requirement for women to achieve a more diverse set of winners. ER -