Women and willingness to guess: an investigation using a high-stake test in the Spanish health sector

Multiple-choice tests are the gateway to important professional outcomes in the Spanish health sector. Every year, thousands of nursing, psychology, pharmacy, and biology graduates take a multiple-choice test, with wrong answers penalized, in order to access an intern position in a hospital. In such tests, willingness to guess , the decision to provide an answer instead of omitting the question can have a differential effect on the overall performance. This paper first studies the evolution of gender differences in willingness to guess, measured by the proportion of answered questions, over a 40-year period. Second, we exploit a natural experiment that occurred between 2014 and 2015, when the number of alternative answers was reduced from 5 to 4, effectively lowering the penalty for incorrect answers, to test for gender differential reactions in willingness to guess.