Gender differences in perception of macroeconomic indicators

This paper examines if there exist gender differences in macroeconomic expectations. Two surveys were implemented in Turkey’s leading CEOs, CFOs, economists, portfolio managers, strategists and academics. One of the survey was conducted in 2013 while the other was in 2014. The survey points out if there are significant differences in expectations among women and men. The survey asks the participant’s macroeconomic expectations. Mainly, inflation, exchange rate, loan interest rate, stock-exchange rate, export and sector-specific expectations are investigated. Response to expectation questions is given on an ordinal scale with three levels. In the survey, a 3-point Likert scale response was used for the questions of export and sector-specific expectations. Firstly, the normality of the observations was tested with the KolmogorovSmirnov test. Then, the differences in macroeconomic expectations of males and females were tested with the Chi-square test of independence. Although the empirical findings of each survey indicate different outputs, the general result mainly exhibits that women are more risk averse than men.