Women prefer less risk & less competition, prioritize equality over efficiency and report a greater willingness to share wealth

Gender preference gaps & voting for redistribution. Eva Ranehill & Roberto A. Weber. Experimental Economics, Jan 6 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10683-021-09741-8

Abstract: There is substantial evidence that women tend to support different policies and political candidates than men. Many studies also document gender differences in a variety of important preference dimensions, such as risk-taking, competition and pro-sociality. However, the degree to which differential voting by men and women is related to these gaps in more basic preferences requires an improved understanding. We conduct an experiment in which individuals in small laboratory “societies” repeatedly vote for redistribution policies and engage in production. We find that women vote for more egalitarian redistribution and that this difference persists with experience and in environments with varying degrees of risk. This gender voting gap is accounted for partly by both gender gaps in preferences and by expectations regarding economic circumstances. However, including both these controls in a regression analysis indicates that the latter is the primary driving force. We also observe policy differences between male- and female-controlled groups, though these are substantially smaller than the mean individual differences—a natural consequence of the aggregation of individual preferences into collective outcomes.

Conclusion

We study the relationship between gender gaps in policy preferences and gaps in more basic preferences. There is widespread evidence that men and women differ in their attitudes toward risk, competition and inequality. Several studies also document that men and women sometimes exhibit different voting behavior, with women favoring greater redistribution. However, the degree to which gender gaps in the policy preferences of men and women are the direct result of more basic preference gaps—rather than of other factors, such as differential economic circumstances—requires better understanding.

To investigate this question, we design an experimental environment in which individuals repeatedly vote for redistribution policies and then engage in production subject to these policies. Consistent with evidence from outside the laboratory, women tend to vote for more egalitarian redistributive policies than men. This gap is substantial and persists with experience and is also very similar in environments with and without risk in the relationship between work and initial income.

We also replicate many previously observed gender gaps in more basic preferences. Women prefer less risk and less competition, prioritize equality over efficiency and report a greater willingness to share wealth. They are also less confident about their relative baseline performance in the task that we employ as the production activity, despite there being no gap in actual baseline performance. We then investigate the extent to which these gaps in basic preferences and expectations can account for the gender gap in voting. Our data suggest that preferences do play a role in voting behavior—particularly social preferences and competitiveness. However, differential expectations of future economic outcomes between men and women appear to have a larger impact on voting behavior. In combination, these two sets of factors go a long way in explaining the gender gap in policy preferences.

Finally, we also study whether the gender gap in policy preferences yields different policies enacted in groups where women, rather than men, hold the majority. We find this to be the case, but the magnitude and statistical strength of the group-level policy gaps is considerably smaller than the gaps at the individual level. Some of this naturally reflects a centralizing tendency of many social choice rules, including those like ours in which the median preferences have a large degree of impact.

Our work is important for better understanding how policies enacted in societies and organizations may change as women exert greater influence and control. First, our finding that expectations about relative performance appear to be a more important factor in explaining the gender gap in voting than gaps in more fundamental preferences indicates that the tendency for women to favor greater redistribution than men may diminish as women obtain better economic outcomes and security. Second, the relatively small policy gaps that we observe at the group level between male-dominated and female-dominated groups indicates that changes in policy outcomes from women exerting greater policy control may not be as dramatic as one might expect when extrapolating from average preference gaps at the individual level. Thus, claims that the world would be a fundamentally different place if women were to control policymaking should be tempered by the fact that such impacts may be relatively small. Our findings also provide an interpretation for why male- and female-majority groups often do not produce very different outcomes, despite the fact that gender differences in preferences seem quite reliable.

It is also worth noting that our evidence comes from contexts that we designed to create a straightforward relationship between the types of preferences often found to differ by gender and the unidimensional policy domain over which people vote. A natural open question is whether such differences persist in other contexts—for example, when the relationship between gender gaps in preferences for risk, competition and equality do not line up to predict concordant directional effects on policy preferences. Our work thus highlights the need for more careful study of precisely how gender differences scale up and persist over time to shape firms, institutions and societies.