Strong Evidence for Gender Differences in Investment

Are men more willing to take financial risks than women? The answer to this question has immediate relevance for many economic issues. We propose a novel approach in which we assemble the data from 10 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.