Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1982.

This paper reviews the literature on gender differences in economic experiments. In the three main sections, we identify robust differences in risk preferences, social (other-regarding) preferences, and competitive preferences. We also speculate on the source of these differences, as well as on their implications. Our hope is that this article will serve as a resource for those seeking to understand gender differences and to use as a starting point to illuminate the debate on gender-specific outcomes in the labor and goods markets.

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Gender Differences in Preferences

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one's own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.

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E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty‐first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture

This paper studies risk attitudes using a large representative survey and a complementary experiment conducted with a representative subject pool in subjects’ homes. Using a question asking people about their willingness to take risks \"in general\", we find that gender, age, height, and parental background have an economically significant impact on willingness to take risks. The experiment confirms the behavioral validity of this measure, using paid lottery choices. Turning to other questions about risk attitudes in specific contexts, we find similar results on the determinants of risk attitudes, and also shed light on the deeper question of stability of risk attitudes across contexts. We conduct a horse race of the ability of different measures to explain risky behaviors such as holdings stocks, occupational choice, and smoking. The question about risk taking in general generates the best all-round predictor of risky behavior.

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Individual Risk Attitudes: Measurement, Determinants and Behavioral Consequences

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews the results from experimental measures of risk aversion for evidence of systematic differences in the behavior of men and women. In most studies, women are found to be more averse to risk than men. Studies with contextual frames show less consistent results. Whether men and women systematically differ in their responses to risk is an important economic question. If women are more sensitive to risk than men, this will be reﬂected in all aspects of their decision making, including choice of profession (and so earnings), investment decisions, and what products to buy. Several recent studies investigate this difference directly. Most experiments that investigate preferences over risky choices deal with the question of whether people make choices that are consistent with expected utility maximization.

Chapter 113 Men, Women and Risk Aversion: Experimental Evidence

Research in social sciences other than economics indicates substan tial differences in behaviour between men and women. The general conclusion drawn from this work is that women will be more socially-orientated (selfless), and men more individually-orientated (selfish). This paper reports the results of a double-anonymous dictator experiment designed to permit the emergence of basic gender differences in economic behaviour. Our results are intended to provide a baseline for further research. We find that women, on average, donate twice as much as men to their anonymous partners when any factors that might confound cooperation are eliminated

Are Women Less Selfish Than Men?: Evidence From Dictator Experiments

We conduct double-anonymous dictator experiments to explore the role of altruism in motivating subjects’ behavior. We vary the extent to which an anonymous recipient is deserving of aid and investigate its effect on the allocation of a ﬁxed pie by student subjects. This is accomplished by including as treatments: (1) an anonymous student subject and (2) an established charity. We ﬁnd that a signiﬁcant increase in donations occurs when we increase the extent to which a donation goes to a recipient generally agreed to be “deserving.” We conclude that subjects are rational in the way they incorporate fairness into their decisions.

Altruism in Anonymous Dictator Games

https://community.middlebury.edu/~jcarpent/EC499/Eckel%20and%20Grossman%201996%20GEB.pdf

Subjects in a laboratory experiment completed the Zuckerman Sensation-Seeking Scale (SSS) then chose among five alternative gambles with substantial financial stakes. The gambles differed in expected return and variance. Gambles were presented in one of two different frames in a between-subjects design. In one, subjects were paid a fixed sum for completing the survey and that sum was then at risk in the subsequent gamble choices. In the other, all payoff amounts for the gambles were non-negative. Subjects were paid according to their choices and the outcomes of the gambles. We tested for sex differences in this choice task and found women to be consistently more risk averse, on average, than men. We observed no difference across frames. Subjects were then asked to guess the gamble choices of each of the other participants and were rewarded for each correct answer. Subjects of both sexes did substantially better than chance in guessing the particular choices of individuals of both sexes, but both men and women overestimated the risk aversion of others, especially that of women, and most strongly of all with respect to men's predictions of women's choices. Possible real-world implications of biased assumptions about women's risk attitudes are discussed.

Philip J. Grossman

Papers

Chapter 113 Men, Women and Risk Aversion: Experimental Evidence

Are Women Less Selfish Than Men?: Evidence From Dictator Experiments

Altruism in Anonymous Dictator Games

Altruism in Anonymous Dictator Games

Sex Differences and Statistical Stereotyping in Attitudes Toward Financial Risk