BEER-SHEVA, Israel, November 13, 2016 – Male athletes are
far more likely to choke under pressure than their female counterparts,
according to researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) as
part of a study of men's and women's Grand Slam Tennis tournament play.
Their paper, Choking Under Pressure and Gender, examined these
high-level athletic competitions, describing them as "a unique
setting in which two professionals compete in a real-life contest with
high monetary rewards," to assess how both men and women respond to
competitive pressure in comparable situations.
“Our research showed that men consistently choke under
competitive pressure, but with regard to women the results are mixed,”
says Dr. Mosi Rosenboim of BGU’s Department of Management at the Guilford Glazer Faculty of Business and Management, BGU. “However, even if women show
a drop in performance in the more crucial stages of the match, it is
still about 50 percent less than that of men.”
“The purpose of this study is to shed additional light on
how men and women respond to competitive pressure and use its conclusions
to better understand the labor market,” says Dr. Danny Cohen-Zada of
BGU’s Department of Economics. “For example, our findings
do not support the existing hypothesis that men earn more than women in
similar jobs because they respond better than women to pressure.”
“For this purpose, we use game-level tennis data on all the
first sets of all four Grand Slam tournaments in 2010 and examine, within
each tennis match, whether and how much each gender deteriorates or
improves at crucial stages of the match,” says Dr. Cohen-Zada. “The
analysis is based on 4,127 women's and 4,153 men's tennis games.”
The study does, however, explain that caution should be
exercised in applying its findings directly to the labor market.
"For one thing, while we analyzed how female tennis
players respond to pressure in a contest that is homogeneous with regard
to gender, in the labor market women are required to respond to
competitive pressure in a different setting where, for example, they
compete with men," says paper co-author Dr. Alex Krumer, of the Swiss Institute of Empirical Economic Research at
the University of St. Gallen.
"In addition, tennis players may have different
preferences and characteristics that may not necessarily make them a
representative subject. Nonetheless, the fact that we have uncovered such
robust evidence that women can respond better than men to competitive
pressure calls for further investigation in other real-life tournament
settings."
According to the researchers, stress influenced by an onset
of heightened cortisol levels is one of the possible culprits, and cite
other researchers’ sports-centric studies that have already shown that
high amounts of cortisol correlate with poor second serves in tennis and
worse golf performance. “This literature indicates that in response to
achievement challenges, cortisol levels increase more rapidly among men
than among women, and that high levels can harm the mind’s critical
abilities,” says paper co-author Dr. Offer Moshe Shapir of the Center for
Business Education and Research at NYU Shanghai.
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