Exploring the gender gap and the impact of residential location on environmental risk tolerance

To explore the effects of the gender gap and differences in residential location on environmental risk tolerance, we analyze data from the US general population and from households living with 50 miles of a US nuclear facility. We hypothesize that a potentially hazardous facility in close proximity to a residential community generates a constant risk signal that conditions and desensitizes that local population, causing the gender gap to converge and causing overall higher risk tolerance levels. We find support for this “context matters” hypothesis, i.e., that in environmentally stressed communities, the gender gap does converge, and males and females exhibit approximately equal levels of risk tolerance greater than those in non-stressed communities. We conclude that when modeling environmental risk tolerance both gender and place of residence should be considered potentially meaningful explanatory variables.