Are Women More Sensitive to the Decision-Making Context?

Abstract

We conduct an experiment to assess gender differences across different economic contexts. Specifically, we test whether women are more sensitive to the decision-making context in situations in which different fairness principles can be used. We find that women adopt more often than men conditional fairness principles that require information about the context. Furthermore, while most men adopt only one decision principle, most women switch between multiple decision principles. These results complement and reinforce Croson and Gneezy's organizing explanation of greater context sensitivity of women.Context-sensitivity, Distributive Justice, Gender differences