Editing Feminist economics (section)

===Exaggeration of gender differences===
In other cases gender differences have been exaggerated, potentially encouraging unjustified stereotyping. In recent works<ref>[[Julie A. Nelson]] (2015) "Are Women Really More Risk-Averse than Men? A Re-Analysis of the Literature Using Expanded Methods." ''Journal of Economic Surveys'' '''29'''(3): 566-585, doi: 10.1111/joes.12069; (2014) "The Power of Stereotyping and Confirmation Bias to Overwhelm Accurate Assessment: The Case of Economics, Gender, and Risk Aversion." ''Journal of Economic Methodology'' '''21'''(3): 211-231, doi: 10.1080/1350178X.2014.939691; and (2015) "Not-So-Strong Evidence for Gender Differences in Risk Taking,"  ''Feminist Economics'', doi: OI:10.1080/13545701.2015.1057609</ref> [[Julie A. Nelson]] has shown how the idea that "women are more risk averse than men," a now-popular assertion from behavioral economics, actually rests on extremely thin empirical evidence. Conducting meta-analyses of recent studies, she demonstrates that, while statistically significant differences in measures of mean risk aversion are sometimes found, the substantive size of these group-level differences tend to be small (on the order of a fraction of a standard deviation), and many other studies fail to find a statistically significant difference at all. Yet the studies that fail to find "difference" are less likely to be published or highlighted.

In addition, claims that men and women have "different" preferences (such as for risk, competition, or altruism) often tend to be misinterpreted as categorical, that is, as applying to all women and all men, as individuals. In fact, small differences in average behavior, such as are found in some studies, are generally accompanied by large overlaps in men's and women's distributions. That is, both men and women can generally be found in the most risk-averse (or competitive or altruistic) groups, as well as in the least.