  Why women avoid participating in a competition and how can we encourage them
to participate in it? In this paper, we investigate how social image concerns
affect women's decision to compete. We first construct a theoretical model and
show that participating in a competition, even under affirmative action
policies favoring women, is costly for women under public observability since
it deviates from traditional female gender norms, resulting in women's low
appearance in competitive environments. We propose and theoretically show that
introducing prosocial incentives in the competitive environment is effective
and robust to public observability since (i) it induces women who are
intrinsically motivated by prosocial incentives to the competitive environment
and (ii) it makes participating in a competition not costly for women from
social image point of view. We conduct a laboratory experiment where we
randomly manipulate the public observability of decisions to compete and test
our theoretical predictions. The results of the experiment are fairly
consistent with our theoretical predictions. We suggest that when designing
policies to promote gender equality in competitive environments, using
prosocial incentives through company philanthropy or other social
responsibility policies, either as substitutes or as complements to traditional
affirmative action policies, could be promising.
