Here’s another one of those scientific studies looking at differences between women and men. Like any good scientific study it is highly stylized. It looks specifically at behavior in an economic bidding game. The women in the sample tended to make less money, on average, than the men, because they were more risk averse. Interestingly, however, this result only held true during certain parts of the women’s menstrual cycle. At other times they did just as well as the men in the game. It would seem, from the results, that having an elevated amount of estrogen in your system makes you more risk averse.

All sorts of nonsense can be talked about results like this. There will be people who claim that it “proves” that women make bad businessmen, for example, and therefore should not be allowed to run companies. This makes about as much sense as saying that, because Roger Federer is a better tennis player than Venus Williams, that all men are better at tennis than all women, so women’s tennis should be scrapped. Differences between individuals can be much greater than the average difference between genders.

What the study does show it what it says: people with more estrogen in their systems are, on average, more risk averse than people without. This probably means that, on average, women make worse gamblers and commodity traders than men. It may also men that, on average, they are less likely to do daft things like drive while drunk, or declare war on other countries. It would seem to me that those are probably good things.