When Lise Vesterlund came to the United States to study economics about 15 years ago, "one of the first things I saw was that the female graduate students didn't ask questions in class."

The Thinkers
This monthly series will highlight people from Western Pennsylvania who are on the forefront of new ideas in their fields.

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Bill Wade, Post-Gazette Name: Lise Vesterlund Age: 39 Position: Economics professor, University of Pittsburgh Education: Bachelor's degree in economics, University of Copenhagen, 1990; master's and doctorate, University of Wisconsin, 1995 and 1997. Previous positions: Visiting professor, Harvard University, 2000-01; assistant professor, Iowa State University, 1997-2001. Professional honors: Early excellence in teaching award, Iowa State College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 2000. Publications: Eleven journal papers since 2001; nine working studies. The Series Click here to view other installments in this continuing series.

Having grown up in Copenhagen with an assertive mother who worked full time as an executive, she wasn't used to seeing that sort of thing.

It started her on a quest to understand why men and women might behave differently in the classroom and in the marketplace, and led to one recent study that has angered some women and set off Internet chats around the world.

The study, done with Muriel Niederle of Stanford University, was designed to explore indirectly why nearly 70 percent of American women are in the labor force but hold only 2.5 percent of the top managerial positions.

Their conclusion: Women are just as skilled as men, but they don't have as strong an appetite for competition.

The conclusion was based on an experiment done at the University of Pittsburgh, where Dr. Vesterlund teaches, that asked groups of young men and women to add up as many sets of five two-digit numbers as they could in five minutes.

In the first round, everyone received 50 cents for each correct answer, and the men and women did equally well, solving an average of 10 problems each.

In the second round, they were put in groups of four and told that the person who solved the most problems would get $2 for each correct answer, while the other three would get nothing. Again, the men and women equaled each other, averaging 12 correct answers.

Then came the kicker. When the participants were asked whether they wanted to go back to the "piece rate" payment method for solving problems or stick with the tournament approach, 75 percent of the men chose the winner-take-all tournament mode, but only 35 percent of the women did.

Even among men and women who were the best at solving problems, the gap was stark. In that group, 80 percent of the men chose the tournament approach, but only 50 percent of the women did.

"At the end of the day," Dr. Vesterlund said, "what appears to be going on is that men and women differ in their preferences for competition; men are more eager to go into a competitive environment, whereas women seem to be shying away from it."

She believes that may be one explanation for why there are not many women in top executive positions.

She doesn't deny that discrimination against women and the fact they interrupt their careers more often to raise children contribute to the imbalance, "but what we're finding is that even if we could remove all these differences, we would not expect to see equal representation of men and women at the very top."

While there are many women "who are incredibly competitive," she said, "our study suggests that women [as a group] prefer environments where you don't have this pressure to perform."

She acknowledged that many women who have heard about the study "are outraged. It's as if we had made up the results -- sort of, how dare you say this?"

But that ignores two points, she noted.

First, the study clearly showed that women performed just as well as men.

Second, she said, the study showed that a disproportionate number of men who weren't that good at solving problems chose the competitive tournament mode -- a phenomenon that may exist in the jousting for upper management jobs in the real world.

The men and women in the experiment weren't interviewed about their decisions, partly because of the risk that they might not voice the true reasons for their choices, she said.

But Dr. Vesterlund suspects that the aversion of most of the women to competition reflects both nature and nurture.

As evidence that some of the difference might be inherited, she noted that "the ways girls and boys play are very different. Boys tend to have goal-oriented interactions where there is usually a winner, whereas girls tend to have play where there is no clear end point -- they're playing parents or going on vacation."

On the nurture side, she said, "I do think we raise boys and girls differently. I think we tend to let boys get away with being boys more than we let girls get away with behaving like boys."

Even though many parents insist they treat their sons and daughters the same, she said, "if you ask most parents who have boys if they've given their sons a doll, they'll still say no."

If it's true that skilled women are opting out of the competitive world of management and less qualified men are taking those slots, the economy is experiencing "a huge efficiency loss," she said.

"From a societal viewpoint," Dr. Vesterlund said, "what we want to figure out is how can we get these highly qualified and productive women" to enter the tournament, so to speak, and "how can we get the low-productivity men not to do it."

One intriguing possibility, she suggested, is that women might be more willing to move into higher management positions if they could do so as part of a group.

She bases that not only on her own experience -- "I hate being the only author of a paper; I don't like competing by myself" -- but on the work of women's volleyball coach Kathleen DeBoer.

In her book, "Gender and Competition: How Men and Women Approach Work and Play Differently," Ms. DeBoer argues that male sports teams often build their tactics around a star player, but that women's teams don't function as well when coaches put the burden on a standout performer.

While the women-and-competition study has generated the most buzz, Dr. Vesterlund has conducted many other economics experiments over the years, including a study that looked at the differences in charitable giving between men and women.

That study showed that men and women donated equal amounts overall, but that men were much more generous when it was cheap for them to give and much less generous when the cost of giving was expensive.

That trend has shown up in studies of how men and women tip waiters at restaurants, she said.

"Men tend to leave a larger tip than 20 percent if the bill is low," she said, "whereas if they have a large meal they tend to shave the tip below 20 percent. Women very religiously stick to the same tipping percentage regardless of the size of the bill."

While some people may wonder how well small-scale economics experiments can translate into the messy, complicated arena of real life, Dr. Vesterlund noted that without controlled experiments, many issues would be left to subjective debates between warring pundits.

"Fundamentally, what we're trying to do is to figure out how to get a better world. What our experiments are helping us to do is to find answers to these issues -- what's the best way to sell goods or the best work environments or how can we get women to enter competitive management ranks?"

In the end, she said, "I think we're making more informed recommendations."