Schedule of Events | Symposia

Graduate Student Award Winner

Why Do Women Overinvest in a Male-Dominated World?

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Lexin Liang¹ (ll5234@nyu.edu), Paul Glimcher²; ¹New York University

Despite significant female education advances, we continue to see substantial gender disparities in income and labor market outcomes. Women are more likely to undertake low-promotability tasks—roles that benefit the group but offer little personal career advancement. This study uses a group-based investment game to examine when and why women prioritize group welfare over personal gains. In the game, participants are placed in groups of five and face an investment decision that only one member can undertake. Critically, investing increases the group’s overall earnings but leaves the investor at a relative disadvantage compared to non-investors, which mimics the payoff structure of real-life low-promotability tasks. We also systematically varied the investor’s payoff and the gender composition of the group. Our findings (N=153) revealed that women overinvested and underearned significantly only when they were the only female in a 5-player group. These results indicate that women’s overinvestment is shaped by gender dynamics of the group rather than fixed individual traits. Comparing empirical data to game theory models revealed distinct decision-making strategies: men’s behaviors followed mixed-strategy Nash Equilibrium, while women’s behaviors aligned more closely with predictions from pure-strategy models. Our findings highlight the importance of including more females in decision-making settings to reduce the undue burdens placed on women and promote more equitable task distributions.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making