A slew of surveys suggest that men are more financially literate than women based on their ability to correctly answer questions that test one’s knowledge of concepts such as compound interest.
Financial literacy tests typically instruct individuals to select a multiple-choice response which typically includes “do not know”. Many more women will select “do not know” if given the opportunity compared to their male counterparts. They specifically chose to study respondents from the Netherlands because the country’s central bank is one of the few that have been collecting financial literacy data, and so the researchers could easily resurvey some of the people who participated in these prior studies.
The results: A narrower gap between the share of correct responses among men and women when people are forced to give an answer. But when forced to pick an answer to the same question on risk diversification, some 82% of men answered correctly compared to some 73% of women — which shakes out to a 9 percentage-point gap.
Taken together, the researchers concluded that boosting women’s financial knowledge through education programs targeted towards them “might not be enough to close the financial literacy gender gap if differences in confidence persist between women and men.”
Universities and colleges?
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