Do Women Supply More Public Goods than Men? Preliminary Experimental Evidence from Matrilineal and Patriarchal Societies

Some 35 years ago, the Club of Rome pub­ lished a book that sold more than 30 million copies across 30 different translations (Donella Meadows et al. 1972). The book predicted the collapse of modern society if population growth, resource depletion, and pollution proceeded unabated. More recently, the Millennium Eco­ system Assessment echoed similar sentiments, documenting the loss of vital ecosystem ser­ vices and predicting a dismal future unless dras­ tic measures were taken. The underlying causes of our rapacious attitude toward the Earth has been conjectured to be linked to several factors, including Homo sapiens’s selfishness and lack of empathy for other humans and other species. The selfishness hypothesis has been stud­ ied extensively in experiments. One popular approach is to use variants of the simple prison­ er’s dilemma game. For example, public goods experiments, which are n­person simultaneous move games, are designed to make individual contributions to the public good yield positive externalities, but noncontribution is a dominant strategy. A typical result in this setting is that subjects are sensitive to free­riding incentives, but nonetheless cooperate at a level that cannot be fully explained by the selfishness assumption. Results from this class of games point to an interesting asymmetry between play across Do Women Supply More Public Goods than Men? Preliminary Experimental Evidence from Matrilineal and Patriarchal Societies