ARE WOMEN REALLY MORE RISK‐AVERSE THAN MEN? A RE‐ANALYSIS OF THE LITERATURE USING EXPANDED METHODS
质疑经济学和金融学中“女性比男性更厌恶风险”的普遍结论，通过计算效应量和相似性指数重新分析35篇文献的数据，发现性别差异实际上更小且重叠度更高，并建议改进研究结果的沟通方式。
Abstract While a substantial literature in economics and finance has concluded that ‘women are more risk averse than men’, this conclusion merits investigation. After briefly clarifying the difference between making generalizations about groups, on the one hand, and making valid inferences from samples, on the other, this essay suggests improvements to how economists communicate our research results. Supplementing findings of statistical significance with quantitative measures of both substantive difference ( Cohen's d , a measure in common use in non‐Economics literatures) and of substantive overlap (the Index of Similarity , newly proposed here) adds important nuance to the discussion of sex differences. These measures are computed from the data on men, women and risk used in 35 scholarly works from economics, finance and decision science. The results are considerably more mixed and overlapping than would commonly be inferred from the broad claims made in the literature, with standardized differences in means mostly amounting to considerably less than one standard deviation, and the degree of overlap between male and female distributions generally exceeding 80%. In addition, studies that look at contextual influences suggest that these contribute importantly to observations of differences both between and within the sexes.