Men, Woman, Cooperation and the Gender Pay Gap
Here is a working paper by Leonie Gerhards and Michael Kosfeld entitled I (Don’t) Like You! But Who Cares? Gender Differences in Same Sex and Mixed Sex Teams. The abstract reads as follows:
We study the effect of likability on female and male team behavior in a lab experiment. Extending a two-player public goods game and a minimum effort game by an additional pre-play stage that informs team members about their mutual likability we find that female teams lower their contribution to the public good in case of low likability, while male teams achieve high levels of cooperation irrespective of the level of mutual likability. In mixed sex teams, both females’ and males’ contributions depend on mutual likability. Similar results are found in the minimum effort game. Our results offer a new perspective on gender differences in labor market outcomes: mutual dislikability impedes team behavior, except in all-male teams.
Aside from that, the paper seems interesting though I should be fair and note I only had time to skim it. Still, if the paper holds up, it requires an explanation.
The first thing to note is that the paper deals with perceived likability rather than actual likability, and the measures come from how participants in the experiment rate photographs of other participants. However, these measures seem to be reasonably stable – an individual rated as likable by one person tends to be rated as likable by others.
Beyond this, we get to a very non-PC explanation for the results the authors found: men and women are said to approach social interactions differently. One often hears that men are more insensitive or otherwise don’t observe social cues the same way women do. There is also some evidence from biology that “males are predisposed to be more ready than females to repair their relationship.” Put another way – it would seem that in a group of people, men are less likely to have friction with others than are women. Two individuals who “get over it” are more likely to successfully cooperate than two individuals who maintain animosity toward each other. And even if only one person is unable to “get over it” that will negatively impact the team performance.
If this result replicates, and if it translates outside a lab environment, it may imply something about the gender pay gap. Playing well with others – coworkers, customers, and other third parties – is an important though often unstated part of every job.
As a sort of aside… I remember once watching a comedy sketch in which the comedian (sorry, I cannot remember who) talked about how, if two women found themselves at a party wearing the same outfits, they’d spend the rest of the rest of the party avoiding each other. On the other hand, according to the comedian, a man spotting another man at a party wearing the same outfit has a new best friend.
Critique:
1, extremely small n
2. who the hell were the participants? college students barely out of adolescence or people actually working in a mixed gender atmosphere?
3. see the combination of 1 and 2
More critique: how do you analyze pay gap based on this? It’s pretty much of a stretch.
Oh good heavns, Mike, you have really stepped into it this time. This working paper goes against a vast literature on male versus female tendencies to cooperate that finds females out-cooperating males all over the place in lots of settings and groups, with a few minor caveats at most. Your generalized summary is just waaaaay off.
I am not going to list the whole lit, which is huge, but there are classic papers in the Economic Journal by Catherine Eckel and Philip J. Grossman and in1999 in the American Economic Review by Nancy Buchan and Rachel Croson, both of these very heavily cited that play into this. A recent more minor paper but more to the point appeared in 2013 in PLOS by Molina, Gimenex-Natal, Cuesta, Gracia-Lazaro, Morena, Sanchez, “Gender difference in cooperation: Experimental evidence on high school students,” htatp://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?-10.1371/journal.pons.9083.00 . I could add a lot more, but you need to realize that at best you have highlighted a possible minor wrinkle on a more general finding that women are for more likely to cooperate than men.
Eckel and Grossman was published in 1998 and Buchan and Croson in 1999. There are caveats, and this WP you have found may have found a few, but you went way overboard on what you took from it, if is indeed not a flawed paper. Note that it has not been published, and not all experimental studies are found to have been sufficiently well done to get published. I say that as someone who has been editing journals that publish lots of experimental papers for a good decade and a half.
My experience working for nearly 40 years in a large corporation with both highly professional groups and hourly paid employees, and on three continents, also several years managing many female employees from professional levels to line-workers… is that females are 10x (hugely) more cooperative with both men and women, then are males.
And yes of course there were female-to-female animosities in both professional and non-professional ranks, but what is incredibly different about females is that those animosities are generally very short lived Males on the other hand carry grudges against other males for decades over the slightest things.,, and find all kinds of ways to avoid cooperating with each other… subtle, but still uncooperative.
My guess, having been married for nearly 50 years and thus experiencing females (my wife’s multitudes of friends, relatives, co-workers over the years) have “ways” of dealing with controversy most males don’t use at all.
Females uses more socially subtle non-verbal communications to find ways to obtain cooperation.. I’m not sure if this is a learned or dna based behavior, but it becomes very obvious if you pay attention over decades of working with both sexes in many capacities on three continents (three cultures).. Us guys aren’t very subtle in our communications with others… probably a testosterone related thing is my best guess..
This is my own generalization over more than 40 years and there are of course exceptions as in all things…. but the exceptions are relatively far less prevalent..
Here’s an interesting observation among managers in the company I worked for … and it was persistent over time. This was based on surveys take by all managers every 5 years… with several questions that by cross referencing answers were used to find out all sorts of things.
Female managers overwhelming find it easier to manage males than females.
Male managers also overwhelming find it easier to manage males than females.
Go figure.
Carol,
Yes its a small n. I placed all sorts of caveats on it. But I mentioned the paper, nevertheless, because it matches some results from other disciplines, including some that are more rigorous than economics. (See below.)
Longtooth,
Thank you for reasonable responses. I imagine you may be finding it somewhat straining and I really do appreciate the effort it must be taking. I note , though, a contradiction between this statement:
and these:
One could, of course, reconcile the statements by noting that the first one is your experience, and the second set of statements seem to come from a larger number of people. Call it the difference between an observation and data.
Barkley,
I always appreciate your comments, even when I don’t agree. And I admit that my perspective is often unusual. My old econometrics professor who later was one of committee co-chairs used to say that my thinking was nonlinear. I think she thought that euphemism beat “strange.”
I probably should have spent a bit longer on this post. I was thinking about writing something about the extent to which the economic literature on gender cooperation differs from the literature in other fields.
I did note one example from bio in the post.
Here is a recent study on how the brain works during cooperation which shows MM being more synchronized than FF during attempts at cooperation:
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2016/06/brain-activity-during-cooperation-differs-by-sex.html
You see some of the same thing in the psych lit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21910518/
http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/bul-137-6-881.pdf. (This one is mixed but indicates men cooperate more with men than women do with women, and men cooperate more in repeated interactions)
Note that I only grabbed one or two but there’s more where that came from.
On the other hand, the economic literature ion gender cooperation, on the other hand, generally sides with the women’s studies literature. (The TL;DR version of that literature: men suck.)
Now, I have found that as a general rule, the women’s studies literature tends to be quite incompatible with the biology and neuroscience literature, and sometimes with the psychology literature. (The latter has its own issues – think “replicability crisis.”) That is at least partly the case here, where it comes to the literature on the degree to which men and women cooperate.
Which raises the question – should economists be more skeptical of results that align with those from fields based on hypotheses, data and experimental results, or with results similar to those from fields that are largely essay and story-telling based? For what little my opinion is worth, I personally like data and am leery of fields with names like x studies in which hoaxers can randomly assemble gibberish and get published.
Mr. Kimel, managing people requires a different form of “cooperation” (if you can call managing “cooperation)” than co-workers with one another. If you were a manager for any length of time you would know this.
Management always holds the power of raises, promotions, job assignments, and “reputation” of the employee among other managers, over the people they’re managing. A poor manager alienates and demoralizes their employees .. they are normally removed from that management role or management relatively quickly (depending on how the company is run from the top).
Optimal management creates a genuine symbiotic relationship with employees…. good management knows this almost intuitively .. and their employees recognize it when they see it… and both bend to retain that relationship. In the end though the manager calls the shots so “cooperation” between managers and employees always has a decided bias.
I hate to say this but one thing male managers have a problem with in managing women is that the males don’t know how to deal effectively with female’s mood swings (at that time of month).. Even my daughter who has managed both men and women say it’s harder for women to manage women because of this …. “hard” meaning only it takes more time and careful attention… she says it’s easier to manage males because, according to her experience, (and mine, and my son’s, and every manager I’ve known) males take more direct straight up issues and directions with less explanation and hand-holding. Some women do as well, not suggesting they don’t.. but on average males and females differ in this regard.
Mike,
You did not do yourself any favors with your reply to me. I only checked your first link, the one you claim shows greater brain similarity among men pairs than women pairs. That is not what it found, and you misrepresented the findings quite substantially. The only part of it that comes close to what you want is that the male pairs did better at the actual button pushing task than the female pairs, although that does not look like any definitive test of much of anything. Tehre was no difference in brain coordination reported. Go reread the paper
I think you should be careful about trying to subtly throw the econ studies I mentioned into “womens’ studies” and literary analysis. These are experimental studies done by high powered people using sophisticated econometrics to analyze the results. I think your comments on this point just look silly. Sorry.
You really need to be aware that I edited JEBO for a decade and now I edit ROBE, and I have seen a lot of this stuff. The result that women are more cooperative in general, again with some odd caveats, is pretty robust.
Longtooth,
I’m not sure to what you are objecting. This quote is representative of the rest of your comment:
Essentially this is stating more or less what the article I quote in the post, the other article I cite in the post, and other articles I cited in comments are stating.
Barkley,
As I stated, I always appreciate your comments, even if we do not agree.
Here, I believe you misread. The study was not greater brain similarity. It was about more effective cooperation. A task was given.
An outcome was measured:
Note the last line. The same degree of attempted and believed cooperation generates worse results. In other words, the effort was the same, but the outcomes were worse.
There is an evolutionary psychology / paleoanthropology literature. Its just past 3 AM on the west coast and I’ve got stuff that needs doing so I don’t have the time to bolster this with cites. To the best of my knowledge, it goes back to Darwin, but generally people talk about the “Hunting Hypothesis.” (Not the book by the same name, though that more or less sorta kinda covers a bit of the same ground. Here’s wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunting_hypothesis. Psychologists have the “male warrior )
The idea is that due to physiology (child bearing on the one hand, muscle strength on the other hand) there was a division of labor throughout going back perhaps to before our ancestors and those of pan troglodytes split ways. In order to obtain meat in any quantity, men had to band together into hunting parties that could work together effectively whether the individuals liked each other or not (and in fact, were often actively trying to move up or down the group ‘s totem pole at each other’s expense).
Males who were unable to essentially read the minds of others males quickly and effectively would tend to get gored by the auroch or what have you. There were no equivalent “female activities” that had the same pressures.
Later, you saw the same thing with armies. Anyway, as I said, there is a big literature out there that goes back a long ways. But the people working on it don’t get invited to the more politically correct parts of campus.
To quote myself:
Probably nobody is reading this now, Mike, but what you posted above agrees with what I said. In that study the male pairs did better at the task, but there was no greater brain coordination between them compared to the women, which is what you suggested the study showed. It did not.
The conclusions Mike professes are far from what the experiment data can demonstrate. It is a giant leap of faith to make such conclusions. Notice the values deomstrated in the language…
t’s easier to manage males because, according to her experience, (and mine, and my son’s, and every manager I’ve known) males take more direct straight up issues and directions with less explanation and hand-holding. Some women do as well, not suggesting they don’t.. but on average males and females differ in this regard.
“Males who were unable to essentially read the minds of others males quickly and effectively would tend to get gored by the auroch or what have you. There were no equivalent “female activities” that had the same pressures.”
Okay, tell me about hunter gatherer life demands…seems cooperations occur in many settings. I think cooking is the basis of our civilization.
Barkley,
In other words, the task was achieving brain coordination.
Add in this:
In other words… the observed inputs (i.e., observable synchronization) seem to be the same, but the observed output (i.e., the actual coordination of responses). Somewhere along the way, even if FF behave the same as MM on this type of test, MM on average outperform FF.
Mike…LOL…and you think this science sophisticated enough to warrant some sort of universal application. Psych and neuroscience are about as good as economics and as prone to touting their own horns. There are some interesting avenues to follow but hardly general in nature.
Dan,
I will have a follow-up post in a day or two. As Pinker says, this is the one area with massive numbers of observations, and that gets replicated with data from different time periods and places. I’m going to post a few of these massive ns.