An experiment on corruption and gender

Abstract

There exists evidence in the social science literature that women may be more relationship- oriented, may have higher standards of ethical behavior and may be more concerned with the common good than men are. This would imply that women are more willing to sacri.ce private pro.t for the public good, which would be especially important for political life. A number of papers with field data have found di¤erences in the corrupt activities of males and females, nonetheless they have drawbacks that may be overcome in a lab experiment. The aim of this paper is to see experimentally if women and men, facing the same situation behave in a di¤erent way, as suggested in the .eld-data studies or, on the contrary, they behave in the same way. The results found in the experiment show that women are indeed less corrupt than men.