Sex differences in personality traits are shrinking among younger generations

Younger generations are showing smaller differences between men and women when it comes to fundamental social and economic attitudes, such as how much they trust others or their willingness to take risks. A global analysis of survey data indicates that these gender gaps are steadily narrowing, challenging the idea that differences in personality traits become more pronounced as societies become more equal. The findings were published in PNAS Nexus.

Economic and social preferences govern how people make decisions in their daily lives. Patience refers to a person’s willingness to delay gratification to receive a larger reward later. Risk-taking describes how comfortable someone is with uncertainty when making choices that could lead to negative outcomes.

Trust involves the baseline expectation that others will act reliably and fairly. Prosociality encompasses behaviors meant to benefit others, such as giving to charity or helping a stranger. Past research has consistently found that men and women tend to score differently on these traits.

For instance, a 2009 review of experimental data indicated that women typically demonstrate less tolerance for financial risk and exhibit different patterns of altruistic behavior compared to men. These baseline behavioral differences have often been cited to explain why men and women continue to experience different outcomes in the labor market. This includes variations in career choices and lifetime earnings.

Building on this, researchers noticed a puzzling trend when looking at data from around the world. A 2018 study found that differences between men and women in traits like patience and trust were actually largest in wealthy countries with high levels of gender equality. This led to the prominent claim that as societies develop and remove social constraints, men and women have more freedom to express deeply rooted, gender-specific traits.

“Gender gaps in preferences have been documented in the empirical literature over the past years, to some extent paralleling gender gaps in socio-economic outcomes,” Uwe Sunde, a professor in the Economics Department at LMU Munich, told PsyPost. “But while gender gaps in earnings, for instance, have started to decline in many countries, there was no evidence up to now about the dynamics of gender gaps in preferences. In previous work, I had been involved in designing behaviorally valid measures of preferences that can be fielded in large-scale surveys on a global scale, so we started thinking about ways to fill the gap regarding the dynamics of gender preference gaps.”

“We did not have a strong prior,” Sunde explained regarding the researchers’ initial expectations. “Taken literally, this would suggest that gender gaps are wider among younger cohorts as they grow up in countries that experience economic and social development.”

The authors of the new study wanted to test this idea from a different angle by looking across generations. They reasoned that if modern development encourages larger gender gaps, these gaps should be widening over time. To find out, they analyzed how these differences between men and women have evolved across different age groups within the same countries.

“At the same time, younger cohorts are presumably exposed to more gender-neutral influences during their impressionable years than cohorts born thirty or forty years earlier,” Sunde noted. “If preferences are stable, this would suggest that gender gaps should be smaller among younger cohorts. Which hypothesis is right is therefore an empirical question. Our data provide support for the latter hypothesis.”

The research, led by Rainer Kotschy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Sunde, utilized two massive international datasets. The first dataset, the Global Preferences Survey, included around 80,000 individuals from 76 countries who answered validated survey questions about their attitudes in 2012. The second dataset, the World Values Survey, included approximately 380,000 individuals from 106 countries, surveyed at various points between 1981 and 2022.

By combining these resources, the researchers could look at people born in different decades and compare the size of the gender gaps within specific countries. To ensure they were tracking generational shifts rather than just the natural effects of aging, the scientists mathematically adjusted the data to account for typical life-cycle changes. For example, people generally become less willing to take physical or financial risks as they get older, regardless of the era in which they were born.

After filtering out these age-related changes, the researchers calculated the average difference in scores between men and women for each birth decade. The results provide evidence of a steady, ongoing decline in gender gaps across all four measured traits. In both datasets, the differences between men and women in patience, risk-taking, trust, and prosociality were smaller among younger generations.

“This suggests that women and men are becoming more similar in their preferences, since preferences are usually formed early in life and fairly stable thereafter, at least that is what the existing evidence seems to show,” Sunde pointed out.

Specifically, the gap between men and women born in the 1980s was roughly 20 percent smaller than the gap between men and women born in the 1950s. This convergence suggests that the psychological profiles of men and women are becoming more similar over time. Interestingly, the researchers found that these gaps narrowed more rapidly in low-income and less gender-equal countries, rather than in highly developed Western nations.

Sunde elaborated on the magnitude of this shift. “In terms of size, our results indicate that gender preference gaps have declined on average by 21.6 percent over one generation (e.g. comparing the 1950 and 1980 birth decades),” he said. “To put this into perspective, the gender wage gap in the United States has decreased by about 50 percent between 1980 and 2010.”

“The practical significance is harder to evaluate,” Sunde continued. “One interpretation is that the decline in the gender preference gap is part of the explanation of greater gender equality in outcomes, besides institutional changes. But it might be a moderate part.”

This nuanced dynamic aligns with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that economic preference gaps between genders do not universally widen in more gender-equal societies, but rather show domain-specific shifts. At the same time, the age and country-level dynamics are in tension with a 2016 study covered by PsyPost. That older project found that risk-taking remains high into older age and shows smaller sex differences in countries characterized by greater poverty and hardship, whereas the new study notes broader generational convergence globally.

As with all research, there are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these results. One primary challenge in this type of analysis is perfectly separating the effects of getting older from the effects of being born in a specific era. The researchers relied on the mathematical assumption that men and women within a country experience similar baseline aging patterns, allowing them to isolate the generational changes.

“Disentangling cohort from age effects is notoriously difficult and we have gone a long way to see whether the effects are due to cohort effects or age,” Sunde told PsyPost. “Our interpretation is that cohort effects, i.e., effects related to socialization during adolescence, are more likely to drive the results than age. But this interpretation is ultimately based on plausibility arguments in view of all of our findings.”

If men and women actually experience psychological aging in drastically different ways that the statistical models could not capture, it might influence the estimated size of the generational gaps. Additionally, the study relies on self-reported survey data, which can sometimes capture what people think they should say rather than how they actually behave in the real world. The questions used in the World Values Survey were also general proxy measures, asking participants what values they thought were important to teach children, rather than placing them in direct behavioral experiments.

Future studies could track the same individuals over several decades using physical or financial experiments to see exactly how these preferences evolve over a lifetime. This would help clarify whether the increasingly similar environments people grow up in today permanently shape their economic traits.

“In ongoing work, we use a modified version of the methodological approach developed in this paper to learn more about whether preferences have become more similar globally among younger cohorts,” Sunde added. “This would speak directly to hypotheses regarding a global convergence in economic preferences.”

The study, “Gender gaps in patience, risk-taking, trust, and prosociality are smaller among younger cohorts,” was authored by Rainer Kotschy and Uwe Sunde.