If you want your daughter to be a high-flying businesswoman or banker, then send her to a single-sex school. This is the conclusion that can be drawn from new research charting the complex relationship between gender and risk-taking.
Next month’s edition of the Economic Journal carries the results of an experiment by two economists at the University of Essex in the UK.
Alison Booth and Patrick Nolen devised a series of questions for 260 male and female pupils that were designed to measure their appetite for risk.
The pupils, from eight state single-sex and coeducational schools in Essex and Suffolk, were asked to choose between a real-stakes lottery and a sure bet. Each student was asked to choose between option 1, which would guarantee they won ￡5 (US$7.7), or option 2, which would see them enter a lottery in which they would flip a coin and receive ￡11 if the coin came up heads or ￡2 if the coin came up tails.
The economists found that, on average, girls, including those from single-sex schools, were 16 percent less likely than boys to opt for the lottery. However, significantly, they found that girls in coed schools were 36 percent less likely to select the lottery than their male peers.
The findings appear to confirm the long-held view that males have a greater appetite for risk than females and go some way to indicating that this may be down to the environment in which a young person grows up.
The economists said that girls attending single-sex schools were as likely as boys to enter the real-stakes gamble and that they were also willing to invest more in a hypothetical risky investment than coed females and all males.
The findings have important implications for the emerging field of experimental economics, which examines why there is an under-representation of women in the City, London’s financial district. If risk attitudes are shaped by environment, changing the educational or training context could help address women’s under-representation in business and banking.
“If the majority of remuneration in high-paying jobs is tied to bonuses based on a company’s performance ... women may choose not to take high-paying jobs because of the uncertainty,” the economists wrote.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the economists may be on to something. Some of the City’s most successful businesswomen went to all-girls’ schools.
Alison Cooper, chief executive of FTSE 100 company Imperial Tobacco, was a pupil at Tiffin Girls’ School, Kingston upon Thames; fund manager Nicola Horlick and financier Baroness Vadera both attended single-sex — albeit private — institutions: Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Northwood College respectively.
The economists said they have yet to explain their findings fully.
However, they suggest that “adolescent females ... may be discouraged from doing so because they are inhibited by culturally driven norms and beliefs about the appropriate mode of female behavior — avoiding risk.”
Once they are placed in an all-female environment, however, this inhibition is reduced.
As Booth and Nolen conclude: “No longer reminded of their own gender identity and society’s norms, they find it easier to make riskier choices than women who are placed in a coed class.”
Choosing a full-fledged confrontation with the US due to the loss of a megacontract for submarines for Australia, France is making a risky bet and other nations are not rushing to its defense. After Australia renounced its deal for conventional submarines in favor of US nuclear-powered ones, France took the extraordinary step of pulling its ambassadors from Washington and Canberra for consultations. Bertrand Badie, an international relations professor at the Sciences Po institute in Paris, said France had put itself in a position where it can only appear to be backing down or losing face once its ambassador returns to the US,
Could delivering COVID-19 immunity directly to the nose — the area of the body via which it is mostly transmitted — help conquer the pandemic? The WHO says clinical trials are under way to evaluate eight nasal spray vaccines that target COVID-19. The most advanced effort so far by China’s Xiamen University, the University of Hong Kong and Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy has completed phase 2 trials. “When the virus infects someone, it usually gets in through the nose,” said researcher Nathalie Mielcarek, who is working with the Lille Pasteur Institute to develop a nasal spray vaccine against whooping cough. “The
FREE-FOR-ALL CONTEST: Taro Kono’s popular support means that he ‘probably has the edge, but if he has a lead, it’s a very vulnerable one,’ an Asia expert said The campaign to become Japan’s next prime minister began yesterday, with four candidates vying for leadership of the ruling party in an unusually close race. In televised speeches, the candidates set out their priorities, from boosting Japan’s digital prowess to addressing the falling birthrate. Among them are two women hoping to lead a nation that has never had a female prime minister, although both are considered long shots. The race follows Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s shock announcement that he would not run for head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Whoever the party picks in a Sept. 29 vote is to contest
PLANNING TO REOPEN: Amid 1,607 new COVID-19 cases, the country is making a shift away from lockdowns, acknowledging that outbreaks will happen Australia reported 1,607 new coronavirus cases yesterday as states and territories gradually shift from trying to eliminate outbreaks to living with the virus. Victoria, home to about a quarter of Australia’s 25 million people, recorded 507 cases as Premier Daniel Andrews said a weeks-long lockdown will end once 70 percent of those 16 and older are fully vaccinated, whether or not there are new cases. Andrews said the state might reach that vaccination threshold around Oct. 26. About 43 percent of Victorians have been fully vaccinated, 46 percent nationwide. “We will do so cautiously, but make no mistake, we are opening this place
RSS