This paper reports the results from an experiment where men and women are paired to
form a two-member team and asked to execute a counting task. An individual’s payoff is
proportional to the joint production of right answers. Participants who perform better than
their partner in the task can punish him or her by imposing a fine. We manipulate the pairs’
gender compositions to analyze whether an individual’s performance and sanctioning
behavior depend on his or her gender and the gender of his or her partner, which is revealed
to the subjects at the beginning of the experiment. The data show that, conditional on underperformance,
women are sanctioned more often and more heavily than men; however, if
they are sanctioned, men tend to improve their performances, while women’s performances
do not change.