Propensity to choke when the chips are down

From How Stress Affects Performance and Competitiveness Across Gender by Jana Cahlíková, Lubomír Cingl, and Ian Levely. From the Abstract.

Because many key career events, such as examinations and interviews, involve competition and stress, gender differences in response to these factors could help to explain the labor market gender gap. In a laboratory experiment, we manipulate psychosocial stress using the Trier Social Stress Test and confirm that this is effective by measuring salivary cortisol level and heart rate. Subjects perform in a real-effort task under both tournament and piece-rate incentives, and we elicit willingness to compete. We find that women under heightened stress perform worse than women in the control group when compensated with tournament incentives, whereas there is no treatment difference under piece-rate incentives. For men, stress does not affect output under competition or under piece rate. The gender gap in willingness to compete is not affected by stress, but stress decreases competitiveness overall, which is related to performance for women. Our results could explain gender differences in performance under competition, with implications for hiring practices and incentive structures in firms.

To clarify.

For women, we find that performance under competition is worse in the stress treatment group than in the control group. Although most female subjects in the control group perform better under tournament incentives than under the piece-rate scheme, many women in the stress treatment group actually do worse. Interestingly, stress alone does not have a negative effect on performance in either women or men. It is the combination of stress and tournament incentives that is detrimental to women’s performance, and this explains the lower willingness to compete among women in the stress treatment group. We do not find such a link among men, for whom there is no treatment difference in tournament performance. The lower willingness to compete among men in the stress treatment seems to be driven by a link between stress and preferences for engaging in competition.

Usual caveats of sociology research. The sample size (95 men and 95 women) is larger than is common but still pretty small for statistical purposes. They don't cite effect size, etc. None-the-less an intriguing effort to answer an interesting question.

However, in the conclusion section, this explanation raises questions about the robustness and integrity of the research.

We propose that the most plausible explanation for decreased performance under stress and competition among women is that the calculation task was perceived as a male-dominant activity, and women faced a stereotype threat. Stress, higher stakes in the tournament, and stereotype threat are all factors that can tax executive function, and the combination of all three could decrease certain abilities, including the impairment of working memory (Schmader et al. 2008).

This is like explaining the outcome as "women faced bad juju in the testing environment." Stereotype-threat has failed to replicate and is an ideological crutch for social justice research. The problem is that it is not real. A judgment arising from its failure to replicate.

If their go-to explanation for the outcome of their research is a long discredited hypothesis, it raises questions about the competency of the research. Interesting experiment and interesting question not-withstanding.