Gender Differences in Risk Behaviour: Does Nurture Matter?

By Alison L. Booth, Patrick J. Nolen. Social Science Research Network, 2012

444 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Women and men may differ in their propensity to choose a risky outcome because of innate preferences or because pressure to conform to gender-stereotypes encourages girls and boys to modify their innate preferences. Single-sex environments are likely to modify students' risk-taking preferences in economically important ways. To test this, we designed a controlled experiment in which subjects were given an opportunity to choose a risky outcome - a real-stakes gamble with a higher expected monetary value than the alternative outcome with a certain payoff - and in which the sensitivity of observed risk choices to environmental factors could be explored. The results of our real-stakes gamble show that gender differences in preferences for risk-taking are indeed sensitive to whether the girl attends a single-sex or coed school. Girls from single-sex schools are as likely to choose the real-stakes gamble as much as boys from either coed or single sex schools, and more likely than coed girls. Moreover, gender differences in preferences for risk-taking are sensitive to the gender mix of the experimental group, with girls being more likely to choose risky outcomes when assigned to all-girl groups. This suggests that observed gender differences in behaviour under uncertainty found in previous studies might reflect social learning rather than inherent gender traits.

Subfields: General Decision Sciences, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/88e2814b93e349530129a3b4ff2730653d12c137

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Citations in the corpus

CEO Gender, Corporate Risk-Taking, and the Efficiency of Capital Allocation (2016, methodology): “…disproportionately self-select into low-risk firms to be better 18 These differences could have biological roots (e.g., Bröder and Hohmann, 2003; Maestripieri et al., 2009) could be the outcome of environmental influences (e.g., Booth and Nolen, 2012), or both (e.g., Edwards and O'Neal, 2009).”
Drivers of Gendered Sectoral and Occupational Segregation in Developing Countries (2020, background): “regarding the robustness of these findings as well as the origin of these differences (Akerlof 2000; Finucane et al. 2000; Booth and Nolen 2009; Bertrand 2010; Charness, Gneezy, and Imas 2013; Nelson 2015).”
The Math Gender Gap: The Role of Culture (2014, background): “For example, Booth and Nolen (2012) and Booth (2009) show that school gender peer effects can explain why girls in girls-only school behave more like boys taking on more risks.”
Let the Girls Learn! It is Not Only About Math… It's About Gender Social Norms (2018, background): “…theory to rationalize the empirical findings that a higher proportion of girls may boost women’s confidence and, subsequently, improve their math performance relative to boys as shown by Gneezy, Niederle and Rustichini 2003, Booth 2009, Booth and Nolen 2012, and Anelli and Peri 2013, among others.”
Gender and competition in adolescence: task matters (2013, background): “Two other studies on adolescents both find that boys are more competitive than girls: Almås et al. (2012) find this to be the case in Norway, as do Booth and Nolen (2012a) in mixed sex groups in the UK.”
Noncognitive Skills, Occupational Attainment, and Relative Wages (2009, background): “Recent experimental evidence, for example, suggests that often-observed gender differences in risk-taking or competitive behaviour depend on the specific social context (Booth and Nolan, 2009a,b).”
Variation in risk seeking behaviour following large losses: A natural experiment (2014, methodology): “By providing the first (quasi) experimental evidence on the change in risk attitudes induced by a large negative wealth shock, this paper contributes both to the research on empirical models of decision under risk (Starmer, 2000; Wakker, 2010) and to the growing literature studying the validity of t”