  Gender differences in human behaviour have attracted generations of social
scientists, who have explored whether males and females act differently in
domains involving competition, risk taking, cooperation, altruism, honesty, as
well as many others. Yet, little is known about gender differences in the
equity-efficiency trade-off. It has been suggested that females are more
equitable than males, but the empirical evidence is weak and inconclusive. This
gap is particularly important, because people in power of redistributing
resources often face a conflict between equity and efficiency, to the point
that this trade-off has been named as "the central problem in distributive
justice". The recently introduced Trade-Off Game (TOG) - in which a
decision-maker has to unilaterally choose between being equitable or being
efficient - offers a unique opportunity to fill this gap. To this end, I
analyse gender differences on a large dataset including all N=5,056 TOG
decisions collected by my research group since we introduced this game. The
results show that females prefer equity over efficiency to a greater extent
than males do. These findings suggest that males and females have different
preferences for resource distribution, and point to new avenues for future
research.
