Fairness, gender and their confounders

Resumen

Gender differences in behavior, both in economic and non-economic domains, have been observed consistently in experimental evidence. A general view derived from these efforts is that women are more altruistic and tend to show more pro-social behavior. By means of an Ultimatum Game, combined with other constructs to control for ability, preferences and personality traits, I present evidence of a laboratory experiment on senior high school students that suggests that gender is not a determinant factor on fairness behavior; in the sense that, once controlling for potential confounders, observed differences are negligible in statistical sense. I present results on two versions of the Ultimatum Game, the direct and strategy method, and find strong evidence of mean behavioral differences across methods but no gender differences within each approach. The document explores some potential routs of explanation.