Women did not bid less competitively than men in a laboratory simulation of career advancement and won more top positions over repeated rounds. The result questions one narrow explanation for the leadership gap, but it does not show how women fare in real promotion processes or measure workplace discrimination.
The distinction matters because women remain underrepresented in management. Women accounted for 40.1% of global employment in 2025 but held 30.5% of managerial positions, according to the International Labour Organization’s latest global review.
Researchers Andrej Angelovski, Jordi Brandts and Werner Güth examined whether part of that gap could be connected to how competitiveness is measured. Their open-access study was published in Theory and Decision on 28 May 2026.
The experiment turned career effort into a bid
Many earlier laboratory studies have tested competition through short, winner-takes-all tasks. Participants might solve maths problems, for example, and decide whether to enter a tournament in which only the best performer receives the prize.
Angelovski, Brandts and Güth used a different model. Their 168 participants, all undergraduate or graduate students, competed for positions in two fictional firms. Women made up 45% of the sample and men 55%. Participants were not told the genders of the people competing with them.
Each group contained eight people. One firm had a relatively flat pay structure, while the other had a steeper gap between its top and middle positions. A participant who obtained no position received a fixed fallback payment.
Instead of completing a work task, participants submitted bids for the positions. The researchers treated a higher bid as a willingness to bear more of the costs that can accompany career advancement, such as training, networking, overtime or lost leisure. It was a simplified monetary representation of those costs, not a claim that employees literally buy promotions.
The auction rule also needs explanation. The highest bidder for a top position won it, but did not pay their own bid. The amount deducted from the position’s salary was set by the next-highest competing bid. The two winners of middle positions paid an amount based on the third-highest bid. This type of second-price or third-price rule is intended to reveal how much a position is worth to each bidder without making the winner pay the full amount they offered.
Participants completed 32 rounds. During the first phase, groups competed only within one firm. During the second, all eight participants could bid across both firms, widening the field of competition without increasing the number of people.
Women won more top positions
Men did not bid more than women on average for either the top positions or all positions combined. The researchers therefore rejected their initial hypotheses that male participants would bid more aggressively.
There was limited evidence that women bid more for the top position in the flatter hierarchy. That result was statistically significant only at the 10% level, a more lenient test than the conventional 5% threshold, and did not appear for the other three positions. It is better read as a tentative pattern than a broad gender difference.
The clearer result concerned who reached the top. Across the 32 rounds, women won an average of 9.21 top positions, compared with 6.95 for men. The difference was statistically significant and was concentrated in the second phase, when participants could bid across both hierarchies.
Because every participant competed repeatedly, those figures are not counts of people promoted in a workplace. They show the average number of top-position wins per participant inside the experimental task.
Winning the top position did not bring higher net earnings
The study’s most useful business insight is that competition, allocation and financial reward were not the same thing.
Women and men had no statistically significant difference in net earnings, defined as the position’s salary minus the auction price. The additional top-position wins for women did not produce an earnings advantage.
There was also a striking result across both genders. Winners of middle positions earned more than the fixed fallback payment, but top-position winners did not earn significantly more than that benchmark. When competition opened across both firms, average earnings fell even though the number of competitors stayed the same.
In this design, a higher rank attracted enough bidding pressure to absorb much of its extra salary. The finding does not mean that real executives are generally worse off than middle managers. Actual promotions can bring future pay rises, authority, experience, job security and status that the experiment did not reproduce. It does show why a title or headline salary is an incomplete measure of career value when reaching it requires substantial time and other personal investment.
The result narrows one theory, not the whole leadership gap
Competitiveness is not a single trait that produces the same result in every setting. A person’s willingness to enter a short performance tournament may differ from their willingness to invest time, money and effort in a longer route to promotion. The authors present the two approaches as complementary, not as rival tests with one correct answer.
The study also says nothing about whether employers evaluate women and men differently. It did not include hiring managers, promotion panels, caring responsibilities, workplace networks, biased assessments or discrimination. The authors explicitly state that their results have no bearing on those barriers.
Several other limits matter. The sample came from one university laboratory in Rome, the participants were students, the jobs were fictional and the study was not preregistered, meaning its analysis plan was not publicly fixed before the results were known. Its repeated auction required numerical decisions under rules that bear only a partial resemblance to a real career.
For employers, the responsible conclusion is not that the leadership gap has been explained. It is that a blanket claim about women being less competitive may depend heavily on the kind of competition being observed. The study did not test a hiring or promotion remedy, but it gives organisations a reason to avoid treating performance in a narrow contest as a complete measure of someone’s willingness to pursue responsibility. The rules, costs and gatekeepers that determine who can advance still require separate examination.
