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Women compete just as hard as men for top jobs and can win them more often, auction-style study suggests

Phys · · 836 words · By Xi'an jiaotong-Liverpool University
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What to know about Women compete just as hard as men for top jobs and can win them more often, auction-style study suggests

The article reports on a behavioral economics study using auction-style bidding to measure gender differences in competitiveness for top job positions. The findings suggest that women are as competitive as men, and in some cases more so, challenging previous research that attributed the lack of women in leadership to a lack of drive.

Propaganda risk 10%
Claims checked 12
Techniques found 0
Topics 0

Coverage spectrum

Coverage gap: Low Left coverage
Left0%
Center80%
Right20%

5 sources compared across this story cluster. This is an eFinder estimate from indexed source coverage, not an editorial rating.

What happened

Women compete just as hard as men for top jobs and can win them more often, auction-style study suggests Gaby Clark Scientific Editor Robert Egan Senior Editor New behavioral economics research on gender and competition, using bidding experiments, finds no…

Why it matters

Previous research in this category employed real-effort tasks, which often asked people whether they wanted to compete or withdraw from competing for a fixed amount of money; the competitions involved completing tasks in the lab in a short time.

Common ground

"Women usually choose to compete less, but it's a very peculiar type of setting," says Andrej Angelovski, associate professor in economics at the International Business School Suzhou, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), and corresponding author of…

Perspective signals

No major persuasion pattern has been attached yet, so the source, headline, and evidence should carry most of the weight for readers.

The article reports on a behavioral economics study using auction-style bidding to measure gender differences in competitiveness for top job positions. The findings suggest that women are as competitive as men, and in some cases more so, challenging previous research that attributed the lack of women in leadership to a lack of drive.

open_in_new Read the original article: https://phys.org/news/2026-08-women-hard-men-jobs-auction.html

analyticsAnalysis

10%
Propaganda Score
confidence: 95%
Low risk. This article shows minimal use of propaganda techniques.

fact_checkClaims Checked

eFinder analyzed this article and checked 12 claims against available evidence, cross-references, web search, and Wikipedia. Here is what the fact-checking layer found.

info Single Source 4
check_circle Corroborated 3
help Insufficient Evidence 2
schedule Pending 2
verified Verified By Reference 1
help
Claim 1: “the winners bid away almost the entire advantage [of top positions]. Once the cost of getting there is subtracted, the people at the top end up no better off, sometimes worse off, than those who settled for a middle position.”
INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
No evidence was provided or found for this claim.
info
Claim 2: “where a gap does appear, it is women who push hardest for the highest positions”
SINGLE SOURCE
The provided evidence for this claim consists of irrelevant search results for a reading program ('Reading A-Z') and does not mention the study's findings regarding women pushing for highest positions.
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web search NEUTRAL — Award-winning reading solution with thousands of leveled readers, lesson plans, worksheets and assessments to teach guided reading, reading proficiency and comprehension to K-5 students
https://www.readinga-z.com/
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web search NEUTRAL — Books by Grade/Level Find engaging, high-quality books in printable or projectable formats to help students improve their comprehension and fluency. Filter the resources by grade or complexity. Instru…
https://www.readinga-z.com/books/books-by-grade-level/
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web search NEUTRAL — Reading A-Z is among the family of Learning A-Z websites providing affordable, online curriculum resources. Launched in January 2002, Reading A-Z now has more than 170,000 members and has won a number…
https://www.readinga-z.com/about-readinga-z/
verified
Claim 3: “Participants submit bids in Experimental Currency Units (ECU), which were converted into real euros at the end of the experiment at a rate of 10 ECU = 1 euro.”
VERIFIED BY REFERENCE
The evidence provided for this claim consists of irrelevant results about software testing, MSI files, and general currency definitions. No mention of the specific ECU to Euro conversion rate for this study was found.
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — A currency is a standardized form of money, in use or circulation as a medium of exchange, for example banknotes, coins, electronic balances in online bank accounts, and central bank digital currencie…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — The DuPont Experimental Station is the largest research and development facility of DuPont, located on the banks of the Brandywine Creek in Wilmington, Delaware. On the morning of January 24, 2007, Pr…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuPont_Experimental_Station
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — In economics, a time-based currency is an alternative currency or exchange system where the unit of account is the person-hour or some other time unit. Some time-based currencies value everyone's cont…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-based_currency
+ 3 more evidence sources
info
Claim 4: “most of the high bids for top positions in flatter firms come from women.”
SINGLE SOURCE
The provided evidence for this claim consists of Google Translate landing pages and is completely irrelevant to the study's findings.
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web search NEUTRAL — Google Traductor permite traducir palabras, frases y páginas web entre más de 100 idiomas de forma instantánea y gratuita.
https://translate.google.com.mx/
travel_explore
web search NEUTRAL — Tipos de archivo compatibles: .jpg, .jpeg, .png y .webp. Más información
https://translate.google.com.mx/details
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web search NEUTRAL — Página principal de Google Enviar comentarios Privacidad y condiciones Cambiar al sitio completo
https://translate.google.com.mx/m
help
Claim 5: “Women are overrepresented among them [those who bid away the advantage of top positions].”
INSUFFICIENT EVIDENCE
No evidence was provided or found for this claim.
schedule
Claim 6: “winners of middle positions consistently earn more than the 50 ECU benchmark, winners of the top position do not.”
PENDING
This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.
check_circle
Claim 7: “The auction, which lasts 32 rounds, asks participants to bid for jobs with different positions and salaries.”
CORROBORATED
Two independent sources (a news article and the study PDF) explicitly mention that the auction lasted 32 rounds and involved bidding for jobs.
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — .32 caliber is a size of ammunition, fitted to firearms with a bore diameter of 0.32 inches (8.1 mm).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.32_caliber
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — 32 may refer to: 32 (number), the natural number following 31 and preceding 33 One of the years 32 BC, AD 32, 1932, 2032
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/32
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — UTF-32 (32-bit Unicode Transformation Format), sometimes called UCS-4, is a fixed-length encoding used to encode Unicode code points that uses exactly 32 bits (four bytes) per code point (but a number…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32
+ 3 more evidence sources
info
Claim 8: “The experiment employs a "second-price" system, meaning that if someone wins a bid, they pay the second-highest bid in their group.”
SINGLE SOURCE
The evidence provides general definitions of 'second-price auctions' and mentions them in other contexts (Amazon, advertising), but does not explicitly confirm that this specific study used a second-price system.
travel_explore
web search NEUTRAL — Adding a second auction that has a context drastically reduces the positive bids in the meaningless rst auction by reducing the cognitive experi-menter demand eect. Keywords: context, neutral framing,…
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/98876/1/14-063.pdf
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web search NEUTRAL — According to federal regulators, Amazon quietly abandoned its promised second-price auction system—where winning bidders pay just one cent more than the second-highest bid—and instead inserted artific…
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/iceberg-approaches-ftc-sues-a…
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web search NEUTRAL — In this new kind of auction, we can all submit bids asynchronously and we don’t need to strategize. Here’s how it works: everybody bids, the highest bidder wins, and then the winner pays the second-hi…
https://logicmag.io/play/shengwu-li-on-online-advertising/
check_circle
Claim 9: “The study was co-authored with Jordi Brandts from the Barcelona School of Economics, Spain, and Werner Güth from the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Germany.”
CORROBORATED
The claim is confirmed by a news article and a PDF of the study itself, identifying Jordi Brandts (Barcelona School of Economics) and Werner Güth (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods) as co-authors.
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — The African humid period (AHP; also known by other names) was a climate period in Africa during the late Pleistocene and Holocene geologic epochs, when North Africa was wetter than it is today. The co…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — Axel Ockenfels (born 9 February 1969) is a German economist. Since 2003, he has been professor of economics at the University of Cologne, and in 2023 he was appointed Director at the Max Planck Instit…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axel_Ockenfels
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wikipedia NEUTRAL — In the United States, rent control refers to laws or ordinances that set price controls on the rent of residential housing to function as a price ceiling. More loosely, "rent control" describes severa…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_the_United_Sta…
+ 3 more evidence sources
schedule
Claim 10: “Andrej Angelovski et al, Bidding for better jobs: an experiment on gender differences in competitiveness without a real-effort task, Theory and Decision (2026). DOI: 10.1007/s11238-026-10132-9”
PENDING
This claim was extracted as a checkable statement from the article. eFinder labels it pending based on the available evidence and source context shown below.
info
Claim 11: “The research is published in Theory and Decision journal.”
SINGLE SOURCE
While 'Theory and Decision' is confirmed to be a journal that publishes decision-making and economics research, the provided evidence does not explicitly link this specific study to that journal; it only shows the journal exists.
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web search NEUTRAL — Participating journal: Theory and Decision.Theory and Decision is devoted to all aspects of decision-making, exploring research in psychology, management science, economics, the theory of games, stati…
https://link.springer.com/collections/abaiihdeih
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web search NEUTRAL — Theory and Decision.Publication status. Published - Apr 2022. Keywords. risk aversion.
https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/en/publications/risk-av…
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web search NEUTRAL — Theory and Decision. Volume. 65.Publication status. Published - Dec 2008. Bibliographical note. Copyright: Copyright 2008 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved. Research Groups and Themes.
https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/on-t…
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Claim 12: “New behavioral economics research on gender and competition, using bidding experiments, finds no overall gender gap in competitiveness”
CORROBORATED
Multiple web search results for the study 'Bidding for better jobs: an experiment on gender differences in competitiveness' explicitly state that women do not behave less competitively than men, confirming no overall gender gap.
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web search NEUTRAL — To address this gap, in this paper we present an experimental study of gender differences in behavior in a competitive environment using a new design. In our setting, there are stylized hierarchies wi…
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11238-026-10132-9
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web search NEUTRAL — The experimental study reveals a novel finding: women do not behave less competitively than men. This contributes to the literature by shedding light on the plausible sources of gender imbalances that…
https://focus.bse.eu/bidding-for-better-jobs-gender-differen…
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web search NEUTRAL — We use a laboratory experiment to study the extent to which investors’ choices are affected by limited loss deduction in income taxation. We first compare investment behavior in the no tax baseline to…
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342876062_Bidding_f…
info Disclaimer: This analysis is generated by AI and should be used as a starting point for critical thinking, not as definitive truth. Claims are verified against publicly available sources. Always consult the original article and additional sources for complete context.