Gender differences in social risk taking

Andreas Friedl, Andreas Pondorfer and Ulrich Schmidt

Journal of Economic Psychology, 2020, vol. 77, issue C

Abstract: Women in Western societies are typically more risk averse than men in individual risk taking decisions. In real life, however, risk taking decisions are usually made in a social context. So far, empirical evidence whether gender differences are also present in the social risk taking domain is missing. We use a controlled experiment to analyze gender differences in social risk taking. We find that inequality aversion is the main driver for risk aversion in social risk taking. Disaggregating the data for males and females shows that this effect is mainly driven by strong inequality aversion of women. Moreover, by running the experiment with non-standard subjects from an egalitarian small-scale society, our results suggest that gender differences in social risk taking are culture-specific.

Keywords: Economic experiments; Social risk taking; Gender differences; Cultural-comparative analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D03 D81 J15 J16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:77:y:2020:i:c:s016748701830641x

DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2019.06.005

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