Are women less risk averse than men? The effect of impending death on risk-taking behavior

The purpose of this article is to present empirical tests of the hypothesis that women are more risk averse than men in the case of impending death. More precisely, we compare male and female attitudes toward risk of health degradation and in the extreme case of risk of life loss. From multivariate analysis, we find that women infected by the HIV virus exhibit less risk taking than men in their contestation behavior. However, other factors including age of the individual at infection, health state (HIV+ vs. full-blown AIDS), medical state (hemophiliac or not), and nationality influence risk-taking behavior. We analyze the impact of these independent variables in risk taking when the sex variable is controlled in the regression equation.