What Jeopardy and Junior Jeopardy can tell us about gender differences in risk taking

Game shows are fun, and funny. As a bonus, they can provide a window into the contestants' decision making in a setting where the rules are known (and if you haven't already seen it, you should check out the show Golden Balls that I blogged about here). And they can provide data that economists can exploit to understand that decision-making.

That is exactly what this 2017 article (ungated) by Jenny Säve-Söderbergh and Gabriella Sjögren Lindquist (both of Stockholm University), published in The Economic Journal, does. Säve-Söderbergh and Sjögren Lindquist (hereafter SSSL) use data from the Swedish edition of the game show Jeopardy and Junior Jeopardy to investigate gender differences in risk taking, and the influence of the gender composition of the other contestants. Specifically, they are looking at whether women (and girls) make different decisions when competing against men (and boys) than when competing against other women (and girls). They also look at whether the differences are the same for adults (in Jeopardy), as for 10-11 year old children (in Junior Jeopardy).

Specifically, they look at what happens when the contestants receive a Daily Double, where they have the option to wager some of their current score on getting the answer (or, since this is Jeopardy, the question) right. Using data from 2000 and 2001 (206 shows of Jeopardy, with 449 contestants) and from 1993-2003 (85 shows of Junior Jeopardy, with 222 contestants), they find that:

...there is no gender gap in wagering among children, in contrast to the results for adults. This result is robust to controls for absolute performance, the difficulty level of the questions, experience, relative performance and performance feedback, in addition to whether children shared the game earnings with their classes. Our second finding is that male and female risk taking differ with age in different ways: whereas girls wager more than women, boys wager less than men.

That in itself is interesting. Girls aged 10-11 years are more risk-takers than boys of the same age, but this reverses among adults. It has been established in many studies that men are less risk averse than women (although those findings are contested), but girls being less risk averse than boys is a surprise.

SSSL then go on to find that:

...female behaviour is sensitive to social context. In particular, despite the high-stakes setting and the lack of strategic advantage created by providing incorrect answers, girls perform worse (answering the Daily Double incorrectly more often and winning less often) and employ less gainful wagering strategies when they are randomly assigned a group of boy opponents compared with when they are randomly assigned a same-gender group of opponents or a mixed-gender group of opponents... Conversely, women wager less if they are randomly assigned a group of male opponents... The performances of boys and men do not change with the social context...

So, essentially boys and men don't seem to care who they are playing against, but girls and women do. And it seems that the social context affects girls more than adult women, since it impacted girls' success in getting the Daily Double question right. SSSL interpret this as potentially showing stereotype threat (where girls perform worse than boys when there is a belief that on average, girls will perform worse than boys). To support this, the authors note that their results may:

...reflect feelings of intimidation in the presence of boys that therefore causes girls to be prone to making mistakes.

It is definitely concerning if girls as young as 10 are being affected by stereotype threat. You could put this down to being just one study in one particular (and fairly unique) context. However, it seems that there is a long history of studies that have identified stereotype threat among children (see here for an overview). If we're concerned about gender gaps among adults, and among university students, then it appears that solutions need to start from a much younger age.