This paper reconsiders the wide agreement that females are more risk averse than males. We survey the existing experimental literature, finding that significance and magnitude of gender differences are task specific. We gather data from 54 replications of the Holt and Laury risk elicitation method, involving about 7,000 subjects. Gender differences appear in less than 10% of the studies and are significant but negligible in magnitude once all the data are pooled. Results are confirmed by structural estimations, which also support a constant relative risk aversion representation of preferences. Gender differences correlate with the presence of a safe option and fixed probabilities in the elicitation method.This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.

The paper performs an in-depth comparison of four incentivised risk elicitation tasks. We show by means of a simulation exercise that part of the often observed heterogeneity of estimates across tasks is due to task-specific measurement error induced by the mere mechanics of the tasks. We run a replication experiment in a homogeneous subject pool using a between subjects one-shot design. Results shows that the task estimates vary over and above what can be explained by the simulations. We investigate the possibility the tasks elicit different types of preferences, rather than simply provide a different measure of the same preferences. In particular, the availability of a riskless alternative plays a prominent role helping to explain part of the differences in the estimated preferences.