Male coaches increase the risk-taking of female teams—Evidence from the NCAA

We analyze the effect of the coach’s gender on risk-taking in women’s NCAA basketball teams. Coach’s gender has a sizable and significant effect on the team’s risk-taking, a finding that is robust to an instrumental variable approach. We find that women’s teams with a male head coach are 6 percentage points more likely to take risk than women’s teams with a female head coach. This gap is persistent within games and does not change with intermediate performance. Since risk-taking has a positive effect on winning a game, female head coaches could improve their team’s success by taking more risk. • The coach’s gender has a sizable and significant effect on the team’s risk-taking, a finding that is robust to an instrumental variable approach. • Women’s teams with a male head coach make risky attempts 6 percentage points more often than women’s teams with a female head coach. • The difference is persistent within games and does not change with intermediate performance. • Risk-taking has a positive effect on winning a game and teams with a female coach would win more often if they chose risky attempts more often. • The gap in risk-taking of female teams by their coach’s gender is the greater, the more experienced their head coach is.