Why figuring out what’s behind a big gender paradox won’t be easy
In Sweden, girls are just as likely to go to school and university as boys are. Women make up a greater proportion of the country’s professional and technical workers than any other country in the world. And their representation in the country’s politics is among the world’s best. But when it comes to personality tests, Swedish men and women are worlds apart.
Malaysia sits toward the opposite end of the scale: despite ranking among the world’s lowest for political empowerment of women and lagging when it comes to women’s health and survival, men and women end up looking similar in those same personality tests. What gives?
This fascinating finding—dubbed the gender-equality paradox—isn't new, but two recent papers report fresh details. In a paper published in Science today, Armin Falk and Johannes Hermle report that gender differences in preferences like risk-taking, patience, and trust were more exaggerated in wealthier and more gender-equal countries. And in a recent paper in the International Journal of Psychology, Erik Mac Giolla and Petri Kajonius provide more detail on the original paradox.
Falk and Hermle used data from the 2012 Gallup World Poll that explored the preferences of around 80,000 people from 76 different countries. People answered questions about how they felt about things like patience and taking risks, and they also did mini-experiments to provide less subjective measurements—for example, choosing whether to take a fixed payment or play a lottery for a larger sum of money. The researchers compared these results to GDP for the 76 countries and also to a measure of gender equality that took into account things like international rankings and how long women have had the vote in each country. They found that richer and more gender-equal countries had bigger gender gaps in people’s preferences.
