Gender Specific Attitudes Towards Risk

Schubert

On the one hand, empirical evidence shows that in financial markets women seem to behave more risk averse than men. On the other hand there is experimental showing that in risky decisions controlled for opportunity sets only the context matters. In investment and insurance contexts with given probabilities women seem to expose approximately the same risk aversion as men. However, in real-life decisions the probability information is rather ambiguous. Therefore also the framing of information may be important. We conducted a lottery experiment introducing three types of probability information: pure risk, weak ambiguity and strong ambiguity. Our main result is that gender differences may arise in ambiguity frames: women are more ambiguity averse than men in the investment context, but not in the insurance context.