UNH Today

While the gender gap has shrunk in some industries, there remains a significant disparity in tech, with women accounting for only 35% of jobs in the information technology (IT) sector and even fewer in senior leadership roles.

There could be many reasons contributing to this gap, but new research led by UNH Paul College Assistant Professor of Decision Sciences Yifei Wang reveals that willingness to compete is not one of them.???

Her findings refute previous research about gender and competition in other fields, such as finance, investment and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), which has generally found that women tend to be less inclined toward competition or avoid aggressive behaviors in competitive environments.???

Published in the Journal of Management Information Systems, the study revealed that women are not only eager to bid on competitive IT work, but they often do so more than men, especially when the tasks involve high coordination complexity.?????

“I wanted to explore this because, as a woman in the IT field, I started to notice over the years, especially during job interviews, that most of my competition was men,” Wang says. “I wanted to find out if the underrepresentation of women in the field is due to them shying away from competing for IT work.”???

Surveying Women in the Field???

Wang and study co-authors conducted three controlled experiments focusing on individuals bidding for online freelance IT projects. Wang says the studies focused on freelance work to remove institutional barriers that may be present in traditional workplaces.???

The first study involved 281 graduate students in IT and business analytics programs, testing their willingness to bid on projects with varying levels of competition, task complexity and coordination needs.?????

The second study replicated this experiment with 232 IT professionals from Amazon Mechanical Turk, broadening the range of experience and backgrounds. In the final study, 400 participants from Prolific were tested using updated technology and client settings.

Women Excel in Competitive and Coordinated Roles??

Across all studies, women were as willing — or more so — to engage in competitive, uncertain environments.??

Women were 17.3% more likely than men to bid on projects with higher levels of competition. When projects involved greater coordination complexity, women were more inclined to bid, with a 17.2% higher likelihood than men.?????

“What aligned with previous research is that women are especially strong in managing and coordinating tasks,” Wang says. “This is called ‘boundary spanning,’ where women excel at coordinating across time zones and geographic locations. Unsurprisingly, women were more likely to bid on projects requiring this type of coordination.”???

The study revealed mixed results on technically challenging tasks. Women bid as much as men on these projects in the first study, but in the second and third studies, they were less likely to bid on these tasks and often requested lower pay.???

“This might indicate that while women feel confident handling coordination challenges, they undervalue themselves on very technical tasks,” Wang explains. “This could be due to lingering workplace or societal biases.”??

Implications for Reducing Gender Disparity??

According to Wang, the findings suggest that structural issues, rather than a lack of interest or ability, may contribute to the gender disparity in IT. Addressing biased hiring practices, wage gaps?and promotion barriers could help close the gap.??

"There may be institutional barriers preventing women from being competitive. If companies understand that women are willing to participate, they could focus on removing those barriers and making changes to their policies,” Wang says. “There are many potential reasons for the disparities; our research rules out a few reasons.”???

Nishtha Langer, associate professor of business analytics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Anandasivam Gopal, professor of information technology and operations management at Nanyang Technological University, were co-authors on the study.?