Risk averse or pro-social: sorting out why women are less corrupt than men with new experimental research

Extensive literature demonstrates that there is a link between being a woman and being more averse to corruption and women’s inclusion in political office and lower levels of corruption. There are two major ways of explaining this correlation; one emphasizes differences between men and women in risk-aversion and the other differences in pro-social behavior. However, whether there is support for these explanations is never directly tested. We take advantage of one opportunity for gathering this evidence by replicating and extending a well-cited experimental study by Alatas et al. (2009). Through our extension of the Alatas et al. study, we were able to collect unique information on gender differences in rationalizations of experimental subjects’ behavior. The key finding is that we see significant gender differences in reasons for behavior: the results indicate that pro-social reasoning but not risk aversion is apparent among women. Men were more likely to say that they behaved based on self-interested rationales.