Willingness to engage in competitive behaviour is important in the context of labour markets, where competition is likely to be higher (in general) for high-profile or well-remunerated jobs. This research might have important considerations from a policy perspective when designing programmes to promote competition in the workplace. Namely, when is the right time to intervene?

It might be possible to have greater impacts on outcomes later in life by targeting intervention from a very early age (pre-three years old) to boost the willingness to compete amongst females. However, this implies that the impact of nature and nurture are more balanced before the age of three (as there are no studies into competitive behaviour at such a young age, it is difficult to know).

Of course, if willingness to compete is largely innate, then it may not matter too much at what stage any interventions occur and, on balance, programmes are likely to have greater impacts if they focus on reducing competitiveness in the labour market to encourage wider participation amongst females.

On a broader, normative point – if we accept there are differences in willingness to compete given gender, then I’m not sure which course of action is more preferable – encouraging females to be more competitive, or making labour markets less competitive? Thoughts welcome…

The actual report is more moderate.

• It argues more female representation at the board level would be desirable, but states that statutory representation isn’t desirable as a means of achieving this – more needs to be done throughout womens’ careers to provide them with equality of opportunity.
• It encourages firms to undertake voluntary pay audits.
• It is receptive to more flexibility around parental leave following the birth of a child – allowing families to decide themselves how they structure such leave, and who takes it.

These seem sensible. What is more concerning is the way the report is likely to be (mis)interpreted – as evidenced on 5Live this morning.

There is evidence to suggest women can materially impact the way boards take decisions – that decisions are likely to be more measured. However, this does not mean that simply having more women on a board will result in a firm’s performance improving. There must be something specific about certain types of female directors which leads to more positive firm performance – just like some men are good directors, and others bad.

So the report is right to highlight the cumulative effect of inequalities in pay and opportunity as a barrier to achieving better representation on boards – and it is here that political effort should be directed, not at legislating to fix outcomes.

The issue of “Womenomics” was one The Economist’s Schumpeter column addressed late last year, who made much the same point:

People who bang on about innate differences should remember that variation within subgroups in the population is usually bigger than the variation between subgroups. Even if it can be established that, on average, women have a higher “emotional-intelligence quotient” than men, that says little about any specific woman. Judging people as individuals rather than as representatives of groups is both morally right and good for business.