Male athletes more likely to choke under pressure: study

Male athletes are far more likely to choke under pressure than their female counterparts, according to a new study.
Researchers at Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev in Israel examined high-level athletic competitions to assess how both men and women respond to competitive pressure in comparable situations.
"Our research showed that men consistently choke under competitive pressure, but with regard to women the results are mixed," said Mosi Rosenboim from BGU.
"However, even if women show a drop in performance in the more crucial stages of the match, it is still about 50 per cent less than that of men," said Rosenboim.

"The purpose of this study is to shed additional light on how men and women respond to competitive pressure and use its conclusions to better understand the labor market," said Danny Cohen-Zada from BGU.
"For example, our findings do not support the existing hypothesis that men earn more than women in similar jobs because they respond better than women to pressure," Cohen-Zada.

"For this purpose, we use game-level tennis data on all the first sets of all four Grand Slam tournaments in 2010 and examine, within each tennis match, whether and how much each gender deteriorates or improves at crucial stages of the match. The analysis is based on 4,127 women's and 4,153 men's tennis games," Cohen-Zada added.

The study explains that caution should be exercised in applying its findings directly to the labor market.
According to the researchers, stress influenced by an onset of heightened cortisol levels is one of the possible culprits, and cite other researcher's sports-centric studies that have already shown that high amounts of cortisol correlate with poor second serves in tennis and worse golf performance.