Study: Gender Gaps in Preferences Narrowing

Younger generations are showing smaller differences between men and women in fundamental social and economic attitudes, such as how much they trust others or their willingness to take risks, according to a new global study. The research, published in PNAS Nexus, analyzed survey data from hundreds of thousands of people across dozens of countries.

Economic and social preferences like patience, risk-taking, trust, and prosociality govern daily decision-making. Patience refers to a person’s willingness to delay gratification to receive a larger reward later. Risk-taking describes how comfortable someone is with uncertainty when making choices that could lead to negative outcomes. Trust involves the baseline expectation that others will act reliably and fairly. Prosociality encompasses behaviors meant to benefit others, such as giving to charity or helping a stranger. Past research consistently found men and women scored differently on these traits, with differences often cited to explain labor market outcomes like career choices and lifetime earnings. The new study, led by Rainer Kotschy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Uwe Sunde at LMU Munich, tested whether these gaps are widening or narrowing over time.

Analyzing generational shifts

The researchers used two massive international datasets: the Global Preferences Survey and the World Values Survey. They compared the size of gender gaps within specific countries across different birth decades, mathematically adjusting for typical life-cycle changes like becoming less risk-tolerant with age.

Uwe Sunde, a professor at LMU Munich, told PsyPost they did not have a strong prior regarding their initial expectations. The team wanted to test a prominent claim from a 2018 study that gender differences in traits like patience were largest in wealthy, gender-equal societies, suggesting gaps widen with development.

Evidence of convergence

After analysis, the data showed a steady decline in gender gaps across all four measured traits. In both datasets, differences between men and women in patience, risk-taking, trust, and prosociality were smaller among younger generations.

Sunde pointed out that this suggests women and men are becoming more similar in their preferences, since preferences are usually formed early in life and fairly stable thereafter.

The gap between men and women born in the 1980s was roughly 20 percent smaller than the gap between those born in the 1950s. Sunde elaborated that gender preference gaps have declined on average by 21.6 percent over one generation. He noted that to put this into perspective, the gender wage gap in the United States has decreased by about 50 percent between 1980 and 2010.

Global and practical significance

Interestingly, the gaps narrowed more rapidly in low-income and less gender-equal countries than in highly developed Western nations. The convergence suggests the psychological profiles of men and women are becoming more similar over time, potentially influenced by more gender-neutral socialization during younger cohorts' formative years.

Sunde continued that the practical significance is harder to evaluate. One interpretation is that the decline in the gender preference gap is part of the explanation of greater gender equality in outcomes, besides institutional changes.

Limitations and future research

The study faces the classic challenge of disentangling cohort effects from age effects. The researchers relied on mathematical assumptions that men and women within a country experience similar baseline aging patterns. Sunde told PsyPost their interpretation is that cohort effects, i.e., effects related to socialization during adolescence, are more likely to drive the results than age, noting this is based on plausibility arguments.

The research also relies on self-reported survey data, which can sometimes capture stated values rather than actual behavior. Future studies could track the same individuals over decades using behavioral experiments to see exactly how these preferences evolve. Sunde added that in ongoing work, they use a modified version of the methodological approach developed in this paper to learn more about whether preferences have become more similar globally among younger cohorts.