The Gender Effect and the 'Investment Game': A Problem of Segregation Rather than of Genes
20 Pages Posted: 8 May 2016
Date Written: July 1, 2007
Abstract
A puzzle in experiments is the gender effect: women and men tend to behave differently. However there is not clear evidence why the gender effect is not constant across repetitions of the same experiment with different samples. For this reason genetic explanations are not satisfactory. This paper tells a different story: genes are not responsible, what matters is segregation. After exploring a wide range of trust games played around the world, this paper presents the result of an investment game repeated in Italy and Norway. Both the literature review and the experiment described in this paper agree on the fact that women from a more emancipated society do not play differently than men. On the opposite side, where emancipation is still scarce, the usual gender effect is observed. I measure emancipation here by the means of a couple of UNDP indicators: the Gender Development Index and the Gender Empowerment Index.
Keywords: investment game, gender effect, women's emancipation, segregation
JEL Classification: J16, C93, Z13
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation