Gazes and numbers: Two experiments in strategic sophistication and gender bias

We investigate whether gender differences in strategic behavior depend on the perceived gender bias of strategic interactions. We use two weakly dominance solvable games where a prize is at stake. The first one is the two-person beauty contest, where strategies are numbers and players must perform mathematical operations. The second is the novel "gaze coach game", where strategies are photographs of the eye region and the two players must assign emotional states to these images. We find that males display significantly higher strategic sophistication than females in the first game but not in the second one, which is perceived to be female biased. However, females are underrepresented among top performers in both games.