Allocation criteria under task performance: The gendered preference for protection

•We run an experiment to study people's preference for allocation criteria.•Players decide as spectators/stakeholders under ignorance or not of payoff distributions.•Women choose significantly more protection before knowing the payoff distributions.•Alternative explanations based on risk, competition and inequality aversion are discussed.

We devise a randomized experiment using task performance in which players (acting as spectators/stakeholders) directly decide on allocation criteria under ignorance or knowledge of the payoff distributions. Our main result is a strong and significant gender effect: women choose significantly more protection (i.e., they choose criteria in which a part or all of the total sum of money allocated among participants is equally distributed) before (but not after) they know the payoff distributions. The gendered preference for protection exists not only for stakeholders but also for spectators, whereas it disappears for both groups once the payoff distributions are known. Alternative explanations based on risk, competition and inequality aversion are discussed.