The Female Sensitivity Hypothesis: Evidence From Experimental Economics

We assess the empirical evidence for the hypothesis that women more than men respond to changes in treatment. First, we examine whether the results of over two hundred experimental economics papers support the female sensitivity hypothesis. Second, using data from two studies (DellaVigna and Pope, 2022; Exley et al., 2025), we conduct over two hundred pairwise tests of the hypothesis. Both analyses show that gender is not predictive of responsiveness to treatment. We further examine how the hypothesis has been disseminated in the literature and find that it is referenced predominantly by papers that support it.