Gender Differences in Pension Investment: The Role of Biased Advice

Abstract Using data from different pension funds in Italy, we document a gender gap in pension investments. We show that women and men in their twenties contribute roughly the same amount of their salary to their pension fund, but women choose a less volatile investment line with lower average returns. We also investigate the gender differences in the propensity to change investment line throughout their life cycle. In a second step, we show that the investment gap may be partly induced by biased advice. We conduct a survey experiment among pension fund advisors and find that advisors are more likely to recommend a less volatile asset allocation to women than to men. We show that the geographic distribution of biased advice aligns well with the geographic distribution of the gender investment gap in the pension fund data.