What the Economists Say
The paper that Tierney refers to, "Do Women Shy Away from Competition," is actually quite interesting, if you have time to read it. (Go to the link in the item below and scroll to the end of Tierney's column, where you can download the paper as a PDF.)
If you can't read it, here's one conclusion from the authors, economists Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund.
"The present paper is part of a research area that tries to understand why women are underrepresented in many high profile jobs and in whole professions," the authors write. "For example, women have a higher attrition rate from science and engineering, and it increases with academic rank.
"Standard explanations include different preferences (or household or biological constraints) of women in terms of time to be invested in a job. An explanation for the lack of women in science and engineering is also possible differences in ability. An alternative explanation is discrimination, namely that the glass ceiling effect is man made, such that women may not be equally promoted and nurtured in science and engineering.
"We studied an additional explanation, namely that women may be less “competitive,” less prone to select into competitions, but not because of differences in preferences over time invested in jobs, or differences in raw ability of performing in a task. "
"...There is indeed evidence that, for example, the decision of women to quit sciences and engineering is not primarily due to ability. ...It seems therefore that decisions of women to remain in male-dominated areas are not driven by actual ability only. In natural settings issues such as the amount of time devoted to the profession, and the desire of women to raise children may provide some explanations for the choices of women.
"In this paper we examined an environment where women and men perform equally well, and where issues of discrimination, or time spent on the job do not have any explanatory power. Nonetheless we find large gender differences in the propensity to choose competitive environments. We feel that the effects we discover in the lab are strong and puzzling enough to call for a greater attention of standard economics to explanations of gender differences that so far have mostly been left in the hands of psychologists and sociologists."
In other words, we don't know the answers, but they don't seem to have anything to do with innate differences in aptitude...and we certainly don't trust certain psychologists and sociologists (you know who you are, SP) to answer these questions.
