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.”
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS