Can we extrapolate from our findings that in general women's judgment becomes more clouded as the stakes become higher, and this may hinder their advancement to the upper echelons of management, science, and the professions? Clearly, the answer must be negative. "To what extent then can we draw from this study more general lessons about gender differences in the labor market? An unforced error is by definition an error that cannot be attributed to any factor other than poor judgment by the player. More important, though, it makes me want to read Paserman's conclusions from his own work so that I can have an intelligent conversation on the subject instead of submitting to knee-jerk reactions (which are definitely tempting).
#Some things crack under pressure professional#
The first thing that springs to my mind is the same question that Paserman raised in his actual study: whether it makes any sense whatsoever to compare professional athletes with CEOs (who, to the best of my knowledge, do not often rely on their hand-eye reflexes to win battles in the boardroom). "It would be a bit of a stretch to conclude that what happens on the tennis court must happen in the boardroom or biology lab," he admits. It's only at the very end of the piece that he suggests that this might not be the case. I'm annoyed not because I think Paserman's study isn't worthy of discussion I'm annoyed because the way Landsburg's piece is framed makes it seem as if the tennis study - and another study based on male/female performance in solving a maze - could provide the explanation for women's underrepresentation in positions of power. It's the sort of stuff that's perfect fodder for an editorial, an opportunity that Landsburg seized.īut putting aside my genetic predisposition to avoid situations that might cause conflict, I've got to say that Landsburg's piece pissed me off. That's pretty interesting, and it definitely does make one wonder why women seem to play more defensively (and less well) than men when the stakes are the highest.
Paserman concluded that both men's and women's performance deteriorates in the final set, when pressure is at its highest - but when he evaluated each point according to how important it was to the overall game, he found that "the propensity of women to commit unforced errors increases significantly with the importance of the point, while men's propensity to commit unforced errors is unaffected by point importance." He wanted to find out whether "men and women respond differently to competitive pressure in a real-world setting with large monetary rewards." Daniele Paserman at Hebrew University, in which Paserman studied the performance of male and female tennis players during crucial moments in eight Grand Slam tournaments played in 20. Landsburg, bases his arguments on this study (PDF) by M. choke.Īccording to Slate, one of the reasons that there are fewer women than men in positions of power is that, according to the relevant article's title, "women are chokers."
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