Do Women Shy Away from Brokerage?

Mars vs. Venus... "There are large gender differences in the propensity to choose competitive environments and this needs to be taken into account in understanding why women are under-represented in many fields of work."

That's a provocative (some would say inflammatory) summary of Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?, a working paper by Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Every January commercial real estate brokerage firms proudly publish advertisements showing their top producers from the previous year. Overwhelming, men dominate these lists, even as women successfully integrate other professions like law and medicine.

Why is this? Hal Varian writing his column, Economic Scene (New York Times, March 9, 2006), describes the NBER experiment. The authors conducted a "contest" involving the addition of numbers to win a modest "prize." What they found was that men and women were equally (!) competent.

BUT, men were much more overconfident in their skills. They held an unwarranted high opinion of themselves. Oops. So they were more like to choose competitive opportunities. Women were less likely.

Remember, these are averages. Individually, we all know very successful, highly confident women brokers. Will women like them become more common among the top ranks of brokers in the future? Why? Why not?

-- Peter Pike