This is a really interesting paper about the management gender gap. Instead of trying to work it all out from first principles they’ve gone looking (rather like Levitt in Freakonomics) for a data set that will let them test different possible explanations for why there are more men in top management than there are women.

Women are under-represented in top management positions on both sides of the Atlantic. The academic literature suggests a number of explanations for this underrepresentation, including self-selection, investment in family and child bearing, lower female human capital investment, or gender discrimination.

OK, that’s a pretty good reading of the usual expanations. Their postulate is that:

A new strand of research considers another hypothesis – that the sexes perform differently under competitive pressures, even if these differences do not exist in non-competitive settings.

Now that makes sense to me to begin with: I’ve seen often enough (and complained about it) that girls do better when education is based around coursework, boys when it is all about exams. Indeed, that’s been hte justification for the swing from purely judging grades on competitive examinations to coursework over recent decades. So we all pretty much agree that it works at the lower levels of education.

The authors of the paper look at the entrance exams to one of the extremely competitive French graduate schools (fewer than 10% of applicants get in, but those who do rise to the very top of French society).

A gender gap in entrance exams

On average, men perform slightly better than women in both the written and oral exams despite evidence the female candidates are ‘better’ in the sense that:

• in the same cohort of candidates, the females performed significantly better than men in the national baccalauréat exam two years prior to the sitting of the HEC admission exam; and
• among the sub-sample of candidates admitted to the school, females outperform the males during the first year of their core curriculum classes at HEC.

Male performance has greater variance

The male performance distribution has greater variance – in the top quartile of examinees, men outperform women, while their written exam scores in the lowest quartile are worse than women. Female candidates’ performance is more concentrated around the median. Since only a small fraction of the initial candidates are admitted to the school, men are more likely to be admitted than women, even though roughly equal numbers of men and women apply.

Now that is interesting, don’t you think? We’ve got that higher male variance thing which is what got Larry Summers into so much trouble at Harvard. And we’ve got the point that in competitive exams, men do better than women. That is, better than their performance in non-competitive tests.

Given that getting into top management is much more like a competitive exam than it is like a non-competitive one (there can be only one CEO for example) we might indeed have our explanation for why there are more men than women in those sorts of jobs.

If you’re a fan of evolutionary psychology you might want to extend this a little too. Most women who are physically capable of having children and want them have, over the history of the species, done so. This isn’t true of men at all. Indeed, it’s said that 40% of men who’ve ever lived had no offspring. So, in evolutionary terms, men are indeed in a much more competitive environment than women are.

Which leads rather to a reductio ad absurdam. The reason there’s more men in higher management is because, well, they’re men.