
What Titled Tuesdays Teach Us About Gender and Competition
The 2024 Chessable Research Awards had five student winners, including Julia Engel, the author of this guest blog post. With the gender gap in leadership remaining an important area of study in economics, Engel uses chess, specifically Chess.com’s Titled Tuesday, to study if men or women are equally likely to reenter in subsequent weeks after disappointing results. This question could have broader implications for how setbacks affect women’s willingness to compete in high-stakes environments. Engel’s findings challenge assumptions about gendered responses to failure; moreover, her research offers lessons on the importance of regular feedback as a means to improve gender parity.
What Chess Tournaments Teach Us About Gender and Competition by Julia Engel
The gender gap in representation in top management levels is a well-established fact (Goldin, 2014). In economics, we have an entire subfield of research dedicated to understanding the gender gap in leadership: how it has evolved over time and why it continues to persist. Experimental and behavioral research has shown one avenue which likely contributes to the gender gap in leadership: men and women have different competitive preferences (Niederle & Vesterlund, 2007). Even if men and women are equally skilled and capable at a task, men are more willing to enter into a “winner-takes-all” type competitive setting than women are. The results imply that there is a portion of highly skilled women who do not enter competitions that they could win. In short: this could result in a misallocation of talent.
My project centers around individuals who have already enlisted into a competitive selection process. I study the effects of disappointing outcomes on subsequent tournament reentry decisions. If setbacks disproportionately discourage women, this could have long-term negative effects on female representation at the top-most level. Testing this hypothesis is surprisingly difficult. Laboratory experiments typically involve a small number of rounds which makes studying longer-run dynamics difficult. Instead, my setting is a chess tournament with elite players. Reassuringly, my results suggest that discouragement is not as strong as might be expected. I find no evidence of gender differences when deciding whether to reenter into a tournament. In a setting with objective feedback, the re-entry choices of top-level men and women are rational.
The project uses two years of data from Chess.com's Titled Tuesday series from April 2020 to April 2022, covering 286,140 games played by 3,508 chess title-holding players. From this data, I reconstruct the players’ placements in each tournament and trace their participation across the entire two-year time period.
Gender Gaps in Competition
The finding that there are gender differences in willingness to compete is nearly two decades old. In general, introducing competitive settings boosts both male and female performance (Gneezy et al., 2003; Gneezy & Rustichini, 2004). At the same time, women tend to opt out of competing at higher rates than men, especially when the task is perceived as male-favoring (Markowsky & Beblo, 2022; Niederle & Vesterlund, 2007; Shurchkov, 2012). So, what can be done about this? In laboratory experiments, experimenters will change small things about the task or the surrounding environment to see whether this leads participants to behave differently. Adjustments such as allowing a familiarity with the setting (Buser, 2016; Cotton et al., 2013; Niederle & Yestrumskas, 2008), affirmative action measures (Niederle et al., 2013) may help narrow the gap and improve the self-selection process into competition. In chess, the introduction of a women’s quota in the French chess league contributed significantly to French women’s performance in chess (De Sousa & Niederle, 2022). A final avenue to narrow the gender gap in willingness to compete is performance feedback. Stylized lab experiments have found that telling participants exactly how they compare against their peers improves selection choices for both men and women (Berlin & Dargnies, 2016; Ertac & Szetes, 2011; Piasente et al., 2023; Shastry et al., 2020; Wozniak, 2012).
What Chess Can Tell Economists
Higher level management and white collar positions are competitive and male-dominated and feature a significant cognitive work component (Autor & Handel, 2013; Bertrand & Hallock, 2001; Goldin, 2014; Niessen-Ruenzi & Ruenzi, 2019), and the chess environment shares these features (Backus et al., 2023; De Sousa & Hollard, 2023). Chess is uniquely suited to explore questions regarding gender and competition as it is one of the few settings where men and women compete against one another (Palacios-Huerta, 2023). As in the labor market for high-level management, chess features few expert female players (De Sousa & Niederle, 2022). The analysis of individual chess games suggests that women perform worse against men than similarly skilled women (Backus et al., 2023; Maass et al., 2008; Smerdon et al., 2020). There are further gender differences in playing styles and risk attitudes: Men's play style at the beginning of a match is more aggressive than that of women (Dreber et al., 2013; Gränsmark, 2012). A further advantage of chess is that game outcomes are the result of skill and cognitive effort. The analysis of chess games has received attention in the labor literature as professional play features a numerical skill measure, randomness in opponent allocation and clean data on games and players. In summary, chess is a quasi-experimental field setting with a rich set of controls suited to study gender differences in behavior.
Methods
Returning to the original research question: To estimate whether there are gender differences in willingness to compete in the long run, I model how many weeks are needed until individuals are willing to reenter into the competition given a specific past performance. I do this via a linear regression, a statistical technique that models the relationship between the weeks elapsed until the next entry and a series of independent variables that likely play a role for this decision (such as Elo, titles, chess federation or country of residence). The model estimates how different factors, like player ratings or past results, influence the time taken to reenter a tournament. I use a variety of standard chess performance measures to model what players may take away from the competition such as performance ratings, percentage scores, and placement percentiles. An important disclaimer: the results are not necessarily causal, but showcase a clear pattern.

Results
In general, players are rational about their reentry choices: Strong performers are faster to reenter the tournament series. Interestingly enough, there are no gender differences between men and women in how they interpret the results and their reentry behavior converges. My findings suggest that when performance feedback is considered, men and women that were initially willing to compete do not react differently to losses in the long-run. In the context of job applications and promotions, this suggests that career-oriented men and women take similarly long to recover from rejection and that this is not a channel through which the gender leadership gap widens. My findings in a field setting are consistent with and support experimental evidence from the laboratory that argues regular feedback helps close the gender gap in competition. In chess, feedback is unavoidable - it comes in the form of an Elo rating, match conclusions, and final rankings.

Chess is a fairly unique setting. It gives men and women the opportunity to take away the same information through objective feedback. Reality may be less clear cut. If the signal quality differs along gender lines, specifically women getting worse feedback than a comparable male peer, then this will trickle down to all future choices on whether to compete or not. Providing feedback based on known, observable, and previously communicated criteria with less room for ambiguity or interpretation leaves less room for (unconscious) gendered biases. Accurate information signals are crucial in sustaining individuals' base desire to compete and ensuring that a qualified field selects into competition. Chess shows that this is possible “in the field.”
References
Autor, D. H., & Handel, M. J. (2013). Putting tasks to the test: Human capital, job tasks, and wages. Journal of Labor Economics, 31(2), S59–S96.
Backus, P., Cubel, M., Guid, M., Sanchez-Pages, S., & Manas, E. (2023). Gender, competition, and performance: Evidence from chess players. Quantitative Economics, 14(1), 349–380.
Berlin, N., & Dargnies, M.-P. (2016). Gender differences in reactions to feedback and willingness to compete. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 130, 320–336.
Bertrand, M., & Hallock, K. F. (2001). The gender gap in top corporate jobs. Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 55(1), 3–21.
Buser, T. (2016). How does the Gender Difference in Willingness to Compete evolve with Experience? (Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper Nos. 16-017/I). Tinbergen Institute.
Cotton, C., McIntrye, F., & Price, J. (2013). Gender differences in repeated competition: Evidence from school math contests. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 86, 52–66.
De Sousa, J., & Hollard, G. (2023). From micro to macro gender differences: Evidence from field tournaments. Management Science, 69(6), 3358–3399.
De Sousa, J., & Niederle, M. (2022). Trickle-Down Effects of Affirmative Action: A Case Study in France (NBER Working Paper No. 30367). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Dreber, A., Gerdes, C., Gränsmark, P., & Little, A. C. (2013). Facial masculinity predicts risk and time preferences in expert chess players. Applied Economics Letters, 20(16), 1477–1480.
Ertac, S., & Szetes, B. (2011). The Effect of Information on Gender Differences in Competitiveness: Experimental Evidence (Working Paper No. 1104). Koc University-Tüsiad Economic Research Forum.
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Markowsky, E., & Beblo, M. (2022). When do we observe a gender gap in competition entry? A meta-analysis of the experimental literature. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 198(2022), 139–163.
Niederle, M., & Vesterlund, L. (2007). Do women shy away from competition? Do men compete too much? The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(3), 1067–1101.
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Niederle, M., & Yestrumskas, A. (2008). Gender Differences in Seeking Challenges: The Role of Institutions (NBER Working Paper No. 13922; NBER Working Paper Series, pp. 1–46). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Niessen-Ruenzi, A., & Ruenzi, S. (2019). Sex matters: Gender bias in the mutual fund industry. Management Science, 65(7), 3001–3025.
Palacios-Huerta, I. (2023). The Beautiful Dataset [Working Paper]. London School of Economics.
Piasente, S., Valente, M., van Veldhuizen, R., & Pfeifer, G. (2023). Does Unfairness Hurt Women? The Effects of Losing Unfair Competitions (IZA Discussion Paper No. 16324). IZA- Institute of Labor Economics.
Shastry, G. K., Shurchkov, O., & Xia, L. X. (2020). Luck or skill: How women and men react to noisy feedback. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 88, 101592.
Shurchkov, O. (2012). Under pressure: Gender differences in output quality and quantity under competition and time constraints. Journal of the European Economic Association, 10(5), 1189–1213.
Smerdon, D., Hu, H., McLennan, A., von Hippel, W., & Albrecht, S. (2020). Female chess players show typical stereotype-threat effects: Commentary on Stafford (2018). Psychological Science, 31(6), 756–759.
Wozniak, D. (2012). Gender differences in a market with relative performance feedback: Professional tennis players. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 83(1), 158–171.
Announcement:
Chessable looks forward to applications for the 2025 cycle of the Chessable Research Awards. Applications open January 15, 2025. For more information, please visit this link.