Women don’t cheat as much on their taxes as men do

As you can see in the graph below, in every country, women were on average more honest about their income than were men.

Does this hold up beyond students? We think so. We found similar results when we conducted a study with adults in the United Kingdom, which lends weight to the idea that our study may be valid beyond this sample. In the adult sample, we had 90 individuals with an average age of 35, compared with an average age of 24 in our student population. Further, Jim Alm and colleagues do not uncover any significant differences between student and non-student populations.

In our study in the United States, men on average reported 60 percent of their income, while women reported 73 percent, for a gender gap of 13 percent. The gender gap was even larger elsewhere — 19 percentage points in Italy, 22 points in the United Kingdom and 25 points in Sweden.

Curiously, the gap was largest in Sweden, which has among the highest levels of gender equality in the world, and the smallest in the United States, which ranks considerably lower.