ABSTRACT: The decision to persist in stratified career trajectories is often dynamic in nature: people receive performance feedback and decide whether to persist or to drop out. I show experimentally that men are on average 10 percentage points (15%) more likely to persist in an environment that rewards high performance than equally performing women who received the same feedback. About one-third of this gap is attributable to gender differences in beliefs about the future; In the laboratory as well as a classroom field study, men are more confident about their future performance even when compared to women who performed equally well and are similarly confident about their past performance. Findings suggest that another 30% of the gender gap in persistence is attributable to men seeking, and women avoiding exposure to additional feedback.

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