Men, women, and risk

[ceri]

Matthew Yglesias is far too technocratic to take without lots of grains of salt, but every so often he points at something interesting. This piece on gender differences in risk management is one such. He links to a study of high-ranked chess players which includes this fascinating bit:

This paper aims to measure differences in risk behavior among expert chess players. The study employs a panel data set on international chess with 1.4 million games recorded over a period of 11 years. The structure of the data set allows us to use individual fixed-effect estimations to control for aspects such as innate ability as well as other characteristics of the players. Most notably, the data contains an objective measure of individual playing strength, the so-called Elo rating. In line with previous research, we find that women are more risk-averse than men. A novel finding is that males choose more aggressive strategies when playing against female opponents even though such strategies reduce their winning probability.

He also links to a paper showing that men take more risks and get worse returns than women as individuals investing on their own in market trading.

The other interesting thing is that he's sincere enough about his technocracy to take the evidence seriously and say that male domination of the financial sector is something to look at and think about dealing with, rather than waving it all away just because it'd be inconvenient.