Gender differences in overplacement in familiar and unfamiliar tasks: Far more similarities

Abstract

This paper explores gender differences in overplacement in two independent and unrelated tasks. The first measures performance via Raven’s Progressive Matrices test, the second in a video presentation assessed by external judges. While in the first task, we expected participants to have prior knowledge about their own experience in similar tasks, we did not expect them to have experience of the second task. Therefore, the latter seems an ideal environment in which to test overplacement given that participants had no ex-ante information with which to make performance predictions. In both cases, participants received monetary incentives depending on the accuracy of their predictions regarding their own performance compared to other participants. We analyzed overplacement – whether participants expect to outperform their actual performance compared to the entire sample – and in/out-group overplacement– whether the participants expect to outperform participants of the same and the opposite sex. Results show that there are no gender differences in any task except in Raven’s Progressive Matrices for out-group overplacement.