Do Women Supply more Public Goods than Men ?

Do Women Supply more Public Goods than Men? Preliminary Experimental Evidence from Matrilineal and Patriarchal Societies Steffen Andersen, Erwin Bulte, Uri Gneezy and John A. List Some 35 years ago the Club of Rome published 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 Ecosystem Assessment echoed similar sentiments, documenting the loss of vital ecosystem services and predicting a dismal future unless drastic measures were taken. The underlying causes of our rapacious attitude towards the Earth has been conjectured to be linked to several factors, including Homo Sapiens’ selfishness and lack of empathy for other humans and other species. The selfishness hypothesis has been studied extensively in experiments. One popular approach is to use variants of the simple prisoners’ dilemma game. For example, public goods experiments, which are n-person simultaneous move games, are designed to make individual contributions to the public good yield positive externalities, but non-contribution is a dominant strategy. A typical result in this setting is that subjects are sensitive to free-riding 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 women and men—women appear more socially minded than men (see Catherine Eckel and Philip Grossman, forthcoming, and Rachel Croson and Gneezy, 2008, for a review). Relatedly, nonexperimental evidence provides support for the hypothesis that gender-specific preferences matter for resource allocation. Ted Goertzler (1983), John Lott and Lawrence Kenny (1999), and Lena Edlund and Rohini Pande (2001) argue that men and women may have different policy