Male coaches increase the risk-taking of female teams—Evidence from the NCAA

Highlights from the article:

The coach’s gender has a sizable and significant effect on the team’s risk-taking, a finding that is robust to an instrumental variable approach.

Women’s teams with a male head coach make risky attempts 6 percentage points more often than women’s teams with a female head coach.

The difference is persistent within games and does not change with intermediate performance.

Risk-taking has a positive effect on winning a game and teams with a female coach would win more often if they chose risky attempts more often.

The gap in risk-taking of female teams by their coach’s gender is the greater, the more experienced their head coach is.

That is from a new paper by René Böheim, Christoph Freudenthaler, and Mario Lackner.