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.
Highlights
It is often claimed that the world, if run by women, would be very different than it is today (Funk & Gathmann, 2015).1 since men have traditionally dominated cultural, political and economic decision making in most societies, we know very little about which institutions, policies and social outcomes would result if women were in charge
Other studies have documented that women tend to favor more progressive redistributive policies (Alesina and Giuliano, 2011; Funk & Gathmann, 2015), which may be a manifestation of such gender gaps in more basic preferences
We first test whether we replicate the gender gaps in basic preferences widely observed in the literature
Summary
It is often claimed that the world, if run by women, would be very different than it is today (Funk & Gathmann, 2015). since men have traditionally dominated cultural, political and economic decision making in most societies, we know very little about which institutions, policies and social outcomes would result if women were in charge. We confirm the typical behavioral gender gaps in the literature—women are more risk averse, less willing to compete and prioritize equality relative to efficiency to a greater degree than men We use these measures to test the extent to which these individual preference gaps account for the gender gap in voting for redistributive policies. While it is natural to assume that a difference in the average preferences for a particular policy between men and women will lead policy outcomes in female- versus male-majority groups to reflect such differences, it is straightforward to show that collective decision making and intra-gender heterogeneity may often dampen these effects.4 Our results confirm this mechanical attenuation of the gender difference in policy preferences.
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