Gender And Competitiveness When Sponsoring Others

Favoritism toward former employer fades over time

Getting ahead at work doesn’t just depend on how hard you promote yourself; it also depends on whether your boss is willing to go to bat for you. When managers advocate for their employees by recommending promotions, giving high-profile assignments, or securing resources, they act as sponsors. Sponsorship is widely recognized as important for career advancement, yet we know surprisingly little about how a manager’s gender, or the gender of the employee they’re sponsoring, shapes how aggressively they compete on that person’s behalf.

Prior research has consistently shown that men are more willing than women to enter competitive situations when the stakes are personal. This gender gap in competitiveness has been linked to differences in educational choices, career paths, and pay. But almost all of this work examines people competing for benefits that accrue to themselves.

The insight that my colleagues and I bring to this pattern of findings is that the well-known gender gap in competitiveness might disappear when the focal person competes on behalf of someone else. In several experiments where we tested our big idea, we assigned participants the role of “manager” and had them choose between a safe payment or a risky, winner-take-all competition, where the earnings would go to an employee assigned as their subordinate, not to themselves. Female managers became notably more competitive in this setting, matching the intensity of their male counterparts.

However, the gender of the employee also mattered: Male managers competed harder for male subordinates than for female ones. This gap wasn’t driven by personal taste or outright prejudice. Instead, male managers appeared to rely on exaggerated stereotypes that assumed women were far more risk-averse than they actually were. As a result, male managers competed less aggressively for the women they were sponsoring.

What makes this finding particularly useful is that the gap vanished when we simply told male managers about their employees’ actual risk preferences. That is, a small evidence-based nudge was enough to eliminate the gender difference. This suggests that organizations don’t need to overhaul their culture to address sponsorship bias — they just need to give managers better data about the people they’re sponsoring.

More broadly, these results illustrate how stereotypes can quietly shape consequential decisions, and how relatively simple interventions providing concrete, individualized information can meaningfully and helpfully change the behavior of managers. Barrymore, N., Dezső, C. L., and King, B. C. (2022). “Gender and Competitiveness When Earning for Others: Experimental Evidence and Implications for Sponsorship.” Strategic Management Journal, 43(5), 905–934. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3353