Gender and confidence: a laboratory experiment with university students

Literature suggests that males are more confident than females. Many students were recently conducted on this topic. The aim of the present work is based on understanding and analyzing if there exists a confidence gender gap in the university field: an incentive lab experiment was conducted with university students. The 180 participants were first year economics students of the Univeristy of Padova attending the microeconomics course. They were asked to complete a sruvey in class, in which they were asked to predict their micreconomics grade of the next exam session, to answer questions based on the Rosenberg scale (a self-esteem scale), and to complete a brief logic test giving a predicition on how many questions they believed to have responded correctly. Moreover, participants were randomly divided into two different treatments: those two different tests differed just in terms of questions order, the content was the same. Such treatment differention was inserted to verify if confidence varies when participants are aware of their performance and abilities. The final results were not far from what literature suggests: males are more confident than females. Confidence seems to be related just to gender: the other variables were not statisically significant, but at the same time helpful to have a better understanding of the final results.