Gender difference in willingness to guess after a failure

A considerable literature in economics and psychology observes substantial gender differences in risk aversion, confidence, and responses to high pressure. In the educational measurement literature, it has been argued that these differences could disadvantage female students when taking multiple-choice tests, especially if there is a penalty for wrong answers. Using a dataset of multiple-choice exams, the author investigates this issue by analyzing the number of unanswered questions. Since most individuals take this exam repeatedly, differences after a failure also can be observed. The results in this article show that there are significant differences between men and women: in the second and third attempts women omit more questions than men. However, this is also the case in the first attempt after excluding the best students.