Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess

Multiple-choice tests play a large role in determining academic and professional outcomes. Performance on these tests hinges not only on a test-taker’s knowledge of the material but also on his willingness to guess when unsure about the answer. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment that explores whether women skip more questions than men. The experimental test consists of practice questions from the SAT II subject tests; we vary the size of the penalty imposed for a wrong answer and the salience of the evaluative nature of the task. We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test-takers answer every question. But, when there is a small penalty for wrong answers, women answer significantly fewer questions than men. We see no differences in knowledge of the material or confidence in the test-takers, and differences in risk preferences fail to explain all of the observed gap. We show that, conditional on their knowledge of the material, test-takers who skip questions do significantly worse on our experimental test, putting women and other test-takers that are less willing to guess at a disadvantage. JEL Classifications: J16, C91, D81, I20 ∗We’d like to thank Max Bazerman, Kristen Baldiga, Daniel Benjamin, Iris Bohnet, Lucas Coffman, Amy Cuddy, Melissa Eccleston, Drew Fudenberg, Jerry Green, Kessely Hong, Stephanie Hurder, Supreet Kaur, Judd Kessler, David Laibson, Soohyung Lee, Kathleen McGinn, Muriel Niederle, Al Roth, Lise Vesterlund and seminar participants at the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics Experimental Economics Session for their helpful input on this work. We’d also like to acknowledge the Harvard Kennedy School Women’s Leadership Board, the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School for their funding and support of this project.