Tell Women They Compete Less, and They'll Prove You Wrong

If you tell women they’re less likely to compete, many will feel an immediate urge to prove that expectation wrong.

Indeed, when women are alerted to gender gaps in applicants for senior positions, they’re more likely to apply, according to research by Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Edward H. Chang that could offer new ideas to attract female candidates to C-suite and board roles. In an experiment on an online executive job search board, women who were told that men were more likely to apply for high-level roles applied to 17% more jobs than those unaware of the gender gap in applications.

“If we tell a woman that society or expectations are constraining her behavior, is that something that's going to motivate her to defy these expectations and therefore apply to more of these jobs? [We found] that yes, she’s more willing to compete,” Chang says.

The findings point to a simple but underused way to address the persistent underrepresentation of women in leadership roles—a gender gap that has proven stubborn for decades. In 2025, women filled only 29% of C-suite roles, according to McKinsey & Company. The gap partly stems from differences in how candidates approach job listings: Women tend to apply for roles only when they meet all qualifications, while men are more likely to aim for jobs that push the boundaries of their experience, studies have shown.

Chang coauthored the article “Can Stereotype Reactance Prompt Women to Compete? A Field Experiment,” published in Organization Science in October, with doctoral candidates Sophia L. Pink and Jose Cervantez, as well as Professor Katherine L. Milkman of the University of Pennsylvania, and Erika L. Kirgios, assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

Women apply for fewer roles

In 2023, Chang partnered with AboveBoard, an executive search platform that helps senior executives from underrepresented groups, including women, find new positions. The company noticed that women were applying less frequently for high-level roles. In the 19 months before Chang and his research partners ran their experiments, the platform found that, on average:

• Men applied to nearly 11 roles.

• Women applied to 8.9 jobs.

“Jobs that are advertised on this platform are all C-level or VP-level positions, but even in this platform that is explicitly about trying to promote equity in these highest-level positions, they still see evidence that men are applying to more jobs than women. And so the question is: How might a company or platform try to address this?” Chang says.

The researchers decided to explore “stereotype reactance,” a psychological term describing people’s tendency to defy negative stereotypes applied to them. Specifically, the researchers wanted to see whether informing women that men were more willing to compete would spur more women to apply.

When women step forward

The researchers first conducted two online experiments using a timed math game, where participants had one minute to find pairs of numbers that added to 100. After completing rounds under different pay schemes, participants could choose whether to be paid less money to work noncompetitively or potentially earn more in a tournament-style competition.

Informing participants about the competitive gender gap significantly increased women’s willingness to jump in—by about 32 and 13 percentage points—and had little to no effect on men, effectively eliminating the gender disparity in competitiveness.

In another study, the researchers showed job seekers who logged into AboveBoard’s platform during a three-month period in 2023 one of two messages:

• A gender-specific message: “Did you know the way you use AboveBoard can help close a key gender gap?” It explained that “equally qualified women are less likely to enter competitions (like applying for jobs) than men. This gives men the upper hand. To close the gender gap, apply for all jobs you find interesting.”

• A non-gender message: It referred to a “usage gap,” rather than a gender gap.

Women informed of the gender gap submitted more than 20% more applications compared to the group that saw the usage gap message on the day they viewed the message and 17% more applications over a seven-day period.

“This suggests that women’s willingness to compete is affected not just by confidence, but also by cultural expectations and motivation to defy stereotypical norms,” the researchers write.

Encouraging women to compete

To push more women to reach for high-level roles, Chang says companies should:

Explicitly acknowledge the gender gap

Including information about gender gaps on HR sites and in job ads may prompt more women to apply. And doing so doesn’t require significant resources, he notes.

“We think that this idea of stereotype reactance is potentially quite powerful, in that activating it is relatively low cost for organizations,” Chang says.

Discuss gender disparities internally

Companies that want to increase the number of women executives by promoting from within could consider sharing gender disparity information to trigger stereotype reactance at other times.

“A moment like when you’re doing a self-evaluation for a performance review could be another critical time to close gender gaps,” Chang says. “Companies could tell women that in general, research has shown that women are less likely to self-promote than men, and this leads to negative outcomes for women.”

Consider the impact on women of color

The researchers found “the effect of communicating the gender gap in competition was larger for racial minority women” than for White women. Racial minority women “may have particularly large concerns about failing to act sufficiently in their own self-interest … because of the unique burdens of their intersectional, underrepresented identities,” they write.

Chang says the stereotype avoidance strategy could potentially also apply to other identities. For example, would telling first-generation college students that they’re less likely than others to take advantage of office hours get them to tap into these resources?

“Might informing racial minorities who are entering a new organization that racial minorities are less likely than their peers to negotiate for higher salaries increase racial minorities’ willingness to negotiate their pay?” the researchers write.

Illustration by Ariana Cohen-Halberstam