When a question gets hard, women are less willing than men to tell someone else what to do, even when both stand to gain from good advice. That is the finding of an experiment by economist Elif B. Osun.
The study appears in the November 2024 issue of Experimental Economics.
A task where nobody gains from bad advice
Osun designed a gender-neutral task with questions of varying difficulty. Crucially, the incentives of the person giving advice and the person receiving it were perfectly aligned, so there was no reason to mislead and every reason to help.
On difficult questions, women were more reluctant to give advice than men.
Not about ability
The gap could not be explained by differences in how well men and women performed on the task itself. Women were not holding back because they knew less.
Self-confidence accounted for some of the difference, but not all of it.
The most telling result came from a change in the rules. When advice became enforceable, the gender gap disappeared.
Guilt and responsibility
To make sense of the results, Osun introduces a model of guilt and responsibility and uses it to discuss mechanisms consistent with the findings.
The bottom line is practical: on hard problems, the gap was not about performance, and a change in the rules was enough to close it.
Study Details:
- Title: Gender differences in advice giving
- Authors: Elif B. Osun
- Journal: Experimental Economics, Vol. 27, No. 5, pages 1068-1105
- Publication Date: November 2024
- DOI: 10.1007/s10683-024-09846-w