I have recently found a study about women’s risk-taking in an online card game. I took it apart in this blog post because I was not sure it was worth including (my research is into physical gaming spaces specifically), but I was interested in it nonetheless. I believe there are some insights regarding gender divides in the outcomes of risk-taking behaviors that can be carried out of the online sphere and into my analysis of physical spaces.
The Researchers
- Eszter Cibor is an applied microeconomist working out of Reykjavik. She is specialized in personnel, behavioral, and experimental economics.
- Dr. Jörg Claussen is a professor at the Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich.
- Mirjam van Praag is an econometrician and current Chairmane of the Executive Board of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, which is a public research university in the Netherlands.
Scope
There has been a question in analyses of women’s and men’s risk-taking, with general findings showing that women are more risk averse than men. However, these results come from “experiments where decisions are one-shot, choices and outcomes are private, and there is no selection into or out of the decision context,” (Cibor et al, 2019) The authors of this paper decided to investigate women’s risk-taking within the online card game community sauspiel.de, where people play Schafkopf, otherwise called Sheepshead.
Methodology
The authors observed all of the games played between September 5th, 2007, and January 9th, 2008. They not only had information on who started each game, but also the cards in each players’ hand in order to assess who has a good or bad hand. They decided there were 3 possible actions that could be considered risk-taking:
- Raising the stakes of the game by “knocking” on the virtual table at the start of each round.
- “Knocking” at the very beginning of the game, after cards are dealt but before any moves are made. This is called a “Contra”.
- Initiating a game.
The authors also took the players’ reported genders from their avatars and profiles as representative of their true genders.
Findings
The authors conclude that women tend towards less risky behavior than men because of “true gender differences,” (Cibor et al, p. 78). By their metrics, women are 7.6% less likely to “knock” than men are; “Contras” are less likely the more women are in each game; and there is a persistent gap in game initiation rates where women trail behind men. The authors consider that their results may stem from the fact that women are consistently show to be less confident than men overall, but claim that confidence is not the main factor in the risky-choice gap because players’ scores are publicly visible and users of the site are directly able to compare themselves to others. They expect that confidence-based risk-taking would show up most in cases where men and women are dealt hands which are neither good nor bad, because men would routinely be overconfident and women vice versa, but no such gap is found.
An important thing to note about assuming gender from the users’ avatars may be inaccurate. The authors dismiss the possibility that a statistically significant number of women may pick male avatars or vice versa because thesauspiel.de website requests user gender at account creation, but does not display this information publicly. The authors found that “a subsample of players not only selecter their avatar’s gender but also reported their gender at registration,” and that within this subsample, “in 97.5 percent of the cases our two measures of gender coincide,” (Cibor et al, p. 78).
Insights
This paper is about an online community, whereas my research has been into physical community spaces. However, I think it is useful to use this paper to gleam insights regarding the unconscious repetition of wider patterns found in ‘Western’ societies. That is, women are risk-averse even when they are behind a screen and anonymized. This is important because a lot of effort has been put in place to allow women to flourish in traditional gaming spaces, yet this is an ever-present uphill battle so long as new women entering into the community come in with risk-averse behaviors.
Furthermore, it may be the case that the “risky” behaviors as determined by the researchers are merely the risky behaviors associated with men. After all, the likelihood of “knocking” decreased the more women were involved in the game. It may be that “knocking,” an activity which takes up space, has been “masculine-coded” in some way and that women players of Schafkopf have other methods by which they take risks. After all, the paper itself remarks that women and men have, on average, the same skills at playing the game.
The authors also neglect the potential that women may have, in the past, had to face consequences for their risk-taking behavior in cases where similar risks have had no consequences for men. A Forbes article by Kim Elsesser titled “Women Aren’t Risk-Averse, They Just Face Consequences When They Take Risks,” discusses just this effect.
In the end, I will not be including this paper in my final project for the class. I don’t think it’s relevant enough to include in my research regarding in-person gaming communities. However, it is exceedingly important to keep in mind that women have been repeatingly demoralized and that the effects of this demoralization are so wide-reaching as to have an effect even in gameplaying when there is anonymity behind a screen.
References
Czibor, E. (n.d.). Home.Eszter Cibor’s Google Site. https://sites.google.com/site/czibore/home.
Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization. (n.d.). Prof. Dr. Jörg Claussen. https://www.en.isto.bwl.uni-muenchen.de/team/professoren/claussen/index.html.
Het Parool. (2017, October 30). Mirjam van Praag nieuwe voorzitter college van bestuur VU. Het Parool. https://www.parool.nl/nieuws/mirjam-van-praag-nieuwe-voorzitter-college-van-bestuur-vu~beb2c0a7/.
Cibor, E., Claussen, J., van Praag. Mirjam. (2019). Women in a men’s world: Risk taking in an online card game community. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 158
