Does Increasing Risk Widen Gender Gaps?

Samuel Hirshman and Alexander Willén ()

No 20/2022, Discussion Paper Series in Economics from Norwegian School of Economics, Department of Economics

Abstract: We examine the response to an exogenous change in the risk profile of an important educational choice – requesting a regrade. We demonstrate how ostensibly gender-neutral policies can generate gaps across men and women because they differ in their perceptions of risk. Specifically, we show that an exogenous shift in the risk of requesting a regrade augmented the regrade request gap by nearly 100 percent. We show that this has consequential implications for students through its impact on their grade points. These findings reveal how gender differences identified in the lab manifest when men and women make real world decisions.

Keywords: risk; gender gaps; educational choices; inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 I24 I26 J16 J70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2022-12-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gen and nep-lab
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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