Are married women less risk-averse? If so, why?

Vox: Are married women less risk-averse? If so, why?

Does marriage make people less averse to risk? This column argues that this is the case for women, but not for men. But married women's different attitude towards risk has fallen over time as the prevalence of marriage in society has faded. For women who work, marriage makes no difference. …

… We interpret our results as follows. The initial emergence and subsequent decline of the marital status gap for women is the joint product of two forces which are often interconnected (see Stevenson and Wolfers 2007). The first is the increase in labour participation (see Figure 2), which drives a general tendency to the emancipation of all women, even those who are still outside the labour force. Emancipation also involves the ability to make financial decisions, so that we observe an increase of the fraction of married women, including housewives, who take charge. The lagged, cumulative impact of this process can explain the initial expansion of the marital status gap, as it widens the financial participation of women so that, at some point at the beginning of the 1990s, different preferences between married and single emerge.

In those days, married women could still count on a stable position within their marriage, so that their choices differ sharply from those of single women. The marital status gap peaks around 1998-2000. Subsequently, a second force comes into the picture, as documented again in Figure 2. Gradually, the previous decade has shaken the foundations of family structure, with an increase of divorces which has in turn eroded the perception of marriage as a safe asset. It is this devaluation of marriage which, consistent with our hypotheses, can explain the convergence of married women to the same preferences of single women.