Busted

Myth: Women Are More Risk-Averse Than Men

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Popular discourse tends to depict women as less likely than men to take risks. Christine LaGarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, famously implied that women make less risky financial decisions when she stated that the financial crisis of 2008 would not have occurred “if it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers”. But are women really more risk-averse than men? Research has in fact shown that men and women are more similar in their risk preferences than commonly believed. We bust this myth with leading experts to show that women may act more risk- averse only because of gender norms that place expectations on them to do so.

Featured Guests:

Dr. Thekla Morgenroth, previously of University of Exeter and now at Purdue University 

Dr. Julie Nelson, University of Massachusetts Boston

Research Mentioned:

  1. Booth, A.L. and Nelson, P. (2012). Gender Differences in Risk Behaviour: Does Nurture Matter? The Economic Journal 122(558), F56-F78.
  2. Botelho, T. and Abraham, M. (2017). Pursuing Quality: How Search Costs and Uncertainty Magnify Gender-based Double Standards in a Multistage Evaluation Process. Administrative Science Quarterly 62(4), 698-730.
  3. Kaplan, S. and Walley, N. (2016). The Risky Rhetoric of Female Risk Aversion. Stanford Social Innovation Review. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_risky_rhetoric_of_female_risk_aversion
  4. Liu, E.M. and Zuo, S.X. (2019). Measuring the impact of interaction between children of a matrilineal and a patriarchal culture on gender differences in risk aversion. PNAS 116(14), 6713- 6719.
  5. Morgenroth, T., Fine, C., Ryan, M.K. and Genat, A.E. (2017). Sex, Drugs, and Reckless Driving: Are Measures Biased Toward Identifying Risk-Taking in Men? Social Psychological and Personality Science 9(6), 744-753.
  6. Nelson, J.A. (2015). Are Women Really More Risk-Averse Than Men? A Reanalysis of the Literature Using Expanded Methods. Journal of Economic Surveys 29(3), 566-585.


    7. For more research and resources (https://www.gendereconomy.org) or click here .

    For transcript + show notes please visit out website (www.gendereconomy.org/Busted) or click here.

    This podcast is a GATE Audio production from the University of Toronto’s Institute for Gender and the Economy: www.gendereconomy.org

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