A new study is the first to examine transgender and cisgender economic behavior, as well as whether sex assigned at birth plays a role in economic decisions. A new study finds that gender and sex assigned at birth are not as important in economic decision-making as previously thought.
A new study published in Scientific Reports is the first to examine transgender and cisgender economic behavior, as well as the first to consider whether sex assigned at birth influences economic decisions.
Helena Fornwagner and Brit Grosskopf from the University of Exeter Business School and Alexander Lauf, Vanessa Schöller, and Silvio Städter (University of Regensburg) have for the first time investigated the role of gender identity and biological sex in economic decision-making.
Gender has long been reported to be a driving factor in domains such as competitiveness, risk-taking, and altruism, but our study is the first to ask how much can be associated with gender, and how much is based on the biological sex people are endowed with.
Helena Fornwagner
The researchers looked into whether being transgender or cisgender affected factors such as whether we compete with others when applying for a new job, investing in a risky asset, or donating to charity.
They hypothesized that if gender identity does determine levels of competitiveness, risk-taking, or altruism with money, then those with the same gender identity (cis men and trans men, and cis women and trans women) will make similar decisions in a controlled experimental study with 780 participants, with roughly half identifying as transgender. People with different gender identities would make very different economic decisions. Furthermore, participants of the same biological sex (cismen and transwomen, and ciswomen and transmen) were expected to behave similarly.
The researchers used a series of well-known economic experiments to determine the participants’ financial competitiveness, willingness to take risks, and willingness to give to charity. Before making any decisions, the participants completed a word search priming exercise in which they were asked to find gender-specific words, which subconsciously assigned them a masculine, feminine, or gender-neutral identity.
Using their study design, the researchers first compare the behavior of cis-gender men, cis women, trans men, and trans women to see if there is a correlation between gender and sex. Second, the priming intervention allowed us to control for gender and behavior-related causal inferences. In contrast to previous studies that found links between gender and economic behavior, the researchers discovered that gender and biological sex have no effect on our economic decisions.
Part of their reasoning for this unexpected finding is that educational initiatives and increased awareness of gender equality in private and professional settings have narrowed any economic behavioral differences discovered in studies nearly two decades ago.
Dr Fornwagner said: “Gender has long been reported to be a driving factor in domains such as competitiveness, risk-taking, and altruism, but our study is the first to ask how much can be associated with gender, and how much is based on the biological sex people are endowed with. Despite the partly unexpected findings that led us to conclude that the role of gender and sex is not as decisive for economic behaviour as previously assumed, we believe there are several important take-aways from this study.”
“Transgender people are becoming a more visible part of society.” As a result, we believe it is critical to understand their economic behavior and to broaden experimental economic research to all groups summarized under the LGBTQ+ flag in order to acknowledge the colorful society we are already a part of in our scientific research.”
