Strong Evidence for Gender Differences in Risk Taking

Gary Charness and Uri Gneezy

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2012, vol. 83, issue 1, 50-58

Abstract: Are men more willing to take financial risks than women? The answer to this question has immediate relevance for many economic issues. We assemble the data from 15 sets of experiments with one simple underlying investment game. Most of these experiments were not designed to investigate gender differences and were conducted by different researchers in different countries, with different instructions, durations, payments, subject pools, etc. The fact that all data come from the same basic investment game allows us to test the robustness of the findings. We find a very consistent result that women invest less, and thus appear to be more financially risk averse than men.

Keywords: Gender differences; Experiment; Risk attitudes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B49 C91 D81 G11 G19 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (617)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:83:y:2012:i:1:p:50-58

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2011.06.007

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