To Close the Competition Gender Gap, Tell Women About It
Stereotype reactance could play a crucial role in motivating women.
- By
- September 04, 2025
- CBR - Behavioral Science
Women face a “broken rung” problem when it comes to advancing in the workplace. While they are well represented in entry-level and early career positions, their numbers dwindle at each rung of the organizational ladder. Data from a 2023 McKinsey report indicate that 28 percent of women had reached the C-suite level. A Fortune article from the same year indicated that about 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies had a female CEO.
Research from a team including Chicago Booth’s Erika Kirgios argues that this gap exists in part because women are less likely than equally qualified men to compete for high-status roles or promotions.
Further, highlighting this competition gender gap motivates women to try for these roles, they write. They posit that this is due to stereotype reactance, the concept that telling people about stereotypes can inspire them to defy expectations.
While lack of confidence likely plays a role in women’s reluctance to compete, adherence to social and cultural norms is another factor, write the researchers. For example, women may fear social backlash for defying the expectation of “feminine niceness” if they are perceived as too competitive. But when women are made aware that those social norms may be holding them back, they might feel motivated to defy them.
To test their hypotheses, the researchers conducted three experiments. First, they recruited about 500 women and 500 men to play an online math game that involved small payments made after each of three rounds.
Participants were paid a noncompetitive, fixed rate (10 cents for each correct answer) for the first round. For the second round, they were randomly matched with someone else and told they’d be paid twice as much if they solved more questions correctly.
Then they were asked which of the two forms of payment they wanted to receive for the third round. One group received a message that highlighted the competition gender gap, while a separate control group did not.
In the control group, just under a quarter of women chose the competitive payment, versus nearly half of men. But in the treatment group, the percentages of participants who opted for that were far closer: 56 percent of women and 54 percent of men. In a follow-up survey, women, but not men, indicated that they were motivated by the message on gender stereotypes.
The more you know
In an experiment, female participants completely closed the gender payment gap after being shown research that women tend to choose competitive pay schemes less often than equally qualified men but go on to outperform them.
The second experiment was similar except that this time the control group received a message about a competition gap that was unrelated to gender (having to do with puzzle experts versus novices), while the treatment group received the same gender-based message as before.
Under these conditions, about a third of women in the control group chose the competitive payment model versus about half of men in the group. But in the group where participants received the gender-based message, 49 percent of women and 46 percent of men chose the competitive payment model. Once again, stereotype reactance affected women’s—but not men’s—behavior.
The researchers then took their analysis into the field, partnering with AboveBoard, a platform that connects experienced candidates with executive-level job opportunities. Its data indicated that men on the platform applied to about 20 percent more jobs than women, on average.
In the field experiment, conducted between February and May 2023, the researchers had AboveBoard display two banners for a total of one week to about 4,000 women who logged into the platform. A control group saw a banner that simply noted the general benefits of using the platform. The treatment group saw a different banner that read, in part, “Equally qualified women are less likely to enter competitions (like applying for jobs) than men. This gives men the upper hand. To close the gender gap, apply for all jobs you find interesting.”
Women in the treatment group applied for 29 percent more jobs that first day than those in the control group, boosting the average number of jobs women applied for on the platform by 20 percent. The message had a slightly bigger impact on Black and Hispanic women than on White women, though all women boosted their application rates in response to the gender gap messaging.
Telling women about the gender competition gap inspires them to take action to close it, the researchers conclude, adding that this could have implications for companies that are looking to improve gender diversity at executive levels.
Sophia L. Pink, Jose Cervantez, Erika Kirgios, Edward H. Chang, and Katherine L. Milkman, “Can Stereotype Reactance Prompt Women to Compete? A Field Experiment,” Organization Science, March 2025.
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