Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess

Katherine Baldiga Coffman

Article | Management Science | February 2014

Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess

Abstract

We present the results of an experiment that explores whether women are less willing than men to guess on multiple-choice tests. Our test consists of practice questions from SAT II subject tests; we vary whether a penalty is imposed for a wrong answer and the salience of the evaluative nature of the task. We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test-takers answer every question. But, when there is a penalty for wrong answers, women answer significantly fewer questions than men. We see no differences in knowledge of the material or confidence in the test-takers, and differences in risk preferences explain less than half of the observed gap. Making the evaluative aspect of the test more salient does not impact the gender gap. We show that, conditional on their knowledge of the material, test-takers who skip questions do significantly worse on our test.

Keywords: economics; behavior; behavioral decision making; microeconomic behavior; education systems; Behavior; Decision Choices and Conditions; Gender; Economics;

Format: Print

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Coffman, Katherine Baldiga. "Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess." Management Science 60, no. 2 (February 2014): 434–448.

This teaching plan serves as a supplement to the cases “Chief: Role for Carolyn Childers,” “Chief: Role for Lindsay Kaplan,” and “Scaling at Chief.”

Multiple-choice exams play a critical role in university admissions across the world. A key question is whether imposing penalties for wrong answers on these exams deters guessing from women more than men, disadvantaging female test-takers. We consider data from a large-scale, high-stakes policy change that removed penalties for wrong answers on the national college entry exam in Chile. The policy change reduced a large gender gap in questions skipped. It also narrowed gender gaps in performance, primarily among high-performing test-takers. Importantly, the gains are largely concentrated in domains characterized by historical female underrepresentation, including math, social science, and chemistry.

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Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess

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