Gender differences in the Marathon of Seville: Are men more overconfident than women?
Abstract
Previous studies show that people tend to overestimate their abilities and that men tend to be more overconfident than women. This study aims to analyse whether Spanish male runners overestimate their abilities compared to women. For this, runners’ predictions of their own finish times in the marathon of Seville 209 are used. Overconfidence is measured as the selection of a starting box made by each runner, based on the time they expect to get in the race, which is inferior to the actual time they are going to get. The results indicated that long-distance runners often give biased predictions and that the bias to be optimistic about the time they are going to get is greater in men than in women. The extent of this behaviour to other contexts may help to explain why women tend to be underrepresented in certain education or the gender wage gap and labour market segregation.
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The works and papers that are published in this Journal are subject to the following terms:
1. The Publication Service of the University of Murcia (the publisher) has the Publication Rights (Copyright) to the published papers and works, and favors and permits the reusing of the same under the license indicated in point 2.
© Servicio de Publicaciones, Universidad de Murcia, 2013
2. The papers and works are to be published in the digital edition of the Journal under the license Creative Commons Reconocimiento-No Comercial-Sin Obra Derivada 3.0 España (legal text). The copying, using, spreading, transmitting and publicly displaying of the papers, works or publication are permitted as long as: i) the authors and original sources (Journal, publisher and URL of the publication) are quoted; ii) it is not used for commercial benefit; iii) the existence and specifications of this users license are mentioned.
3. Conditions of Self-Archiving. It is permitted and encouraged that the authors spread electronically the pre-print (before printing) and/or post-print (the revised, evaluated and accepted) versions of their papers or works before their publication since this favors their circulation and early diffusion and therefore can help increase their citation and quotation, and also there reach through the academic community.
