Project description
Understanding why gender gaps persist
Despite years of progress, women remain underrepresented in leadership roles across Europe, making up only about a third of managers. This imbalance persists even as gender equality is championed in EU policy. However, why do these gaps remain? Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the React2Success project is investigating how men and women respond differently to success and failure under pressure. It will focus on high-stakes exams and job competitions. By analysing population-wide data alongside behavioural surveys, the project aims to uncover the subtle psychological and structural barriers that affect women’s educational and career outcomes. The goal is to generate solid evidence that can inform smarter, more effective equality policies.
Objective
Reducing gender inequality is one of society’s greatest challenges and a top priority of the European Commission as reflected in its Gender Equality Strategy 2020-25. One of the UN Global Goal targets is ensuring women’s effective participation at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and public. Yet, only around a third of managers in the EU are women (2022 SDG statistics). Why?
The objective of React2Success is to uncover how gender behavioural differences in reaction to success and failure under competitive pressure influence gender gaps in educational and career paths and, ultimately, unpack the mechanisms by which gender inequality persists.
Providing causal evidence on gender gaps in reaction to performance shocks in competitive settings —such as job applications for leadership roles or high-stakes exams— remains challenging. In real-life settings, gender differences in preferences for competition result in self-selected samples, while in tournament-like lab experiments incentives often differ from real-world conditions. React2Success aims to fill this gap.
I will take an interdisciplinary theoretically-driven Big Data approach by linking detailed population-level administrative records of both low-stakes high school and high-stakes university admission examinations with information on non-cognitive and long-term socio-economic outcomes from experimental survey data to: First, document gender gaps in response to competitive pressure in a real-life setting addressing concerns of sample-selection bias and external validity. Second, examine gender differences in reaction to success and failure in a high-stake competitive setting and shed light on the behavioural mechanisms at work.
React2Success will also go beyond its immediate scope to establish the long-term socio-economic impact of these gender gaps and supply scientific evidence for devising cost-effective policies to tackle persistent equality issues in the allocation of talent.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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41004 Sevilla
Spain
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