Gendered Instructions and Economic Behavior

Abstract

Natural language is essential for human decision making and interaction. It is used to convey the consequences of choices, the rules of interaction, and to exchange information. In languages with grammatical gender, entity nouns (e.g., "the student" or "the worker") can be written in a male, a female or, more recently, to promote gender equality and to include people identifying as non-binary, in gender-inclusive forms. There is an ongoing debate if the usage of male, female, or gender inclusive forms triggers gender stereotypes and leads to potential biases in decision making. We conducted a controlled experiment and systematically varied the framing of the instructions either using the male, the female, or the gender-inclusive form. Participants made economic decisions measuring their degree of altruism, reciprocity, and honesty in simple economic games. We study if participants behaved differently when their self-reported gender matched the grammatical gender used in the instructions. We observe a gender gap in altruism if instructions used the (common) male form. In contrast, this gender gap was not present if the gender-inclusive frame was used. This line of research is important for experimental methodology on how to write instructions in languages with grammatical gender and for practitioners in law and organizations.