Women are Risk-happy Too

Many people believe that women are more risk averse than men, and therefore they make safer and more cautious financial decisions.

Many people believe that women are more risk averse than men, and therefore they make safer and more cautious financial decisions. There is also some research suggesting that such gender differences may be biologically encoded or evolutionarily programmed.

But Priyanka B Carr and Claude M Steele of Columbia University now say that these are just negative stereotypes—like the one about women being irrational. So they studied how women make financial decisions: when faced with negative stereotypes and when not. In experiments, some volunteers were told that they would be completing tasks to measure their mathematical, logical and reasoning abilities, thus raising the stereotype in the volunteers’ mind. Other volunteers were only told that they would be working on puzzles. Then, each person completed the same tasks designed to assess one’s financial decision-making choices. The researchers found out that when the negative stereotype about women was not hinted at, there were no gender differences in financial decision-making. There was no social context skew.