Gender Differences in Pension Investment: The Role of Biased Advice

We study whether gender-biased financial advice contributes to the gender gap in pension wealth. Using administrative records from four private pension funds in Italy, we document that women are ceteris paribus 8 percentage points less likely than men to choose stock-focused investment lines at the time of enrollment. To assess whether advisory behavior contributes to this gap, we conduct a vignette-based survey experiment among pension advisors affiliated to the four funds, randomly varying the gender of otherwise identical prospective 25-year-old clients. Advisors are 22 percentage points less likely to recommend stock-oriented portfolios to female clients, even after conditioning on advisors’ beliefs about relevant client characteristics. We further show that a simple information intervention that makes advisors aware of the documented gender bias eliminates this gap in the experimental setting. Linking advisors to real clients in the administrative data, we demonstrate that the gender gap in actual investment choices shrinks by ap proximately 60% during the five months following the intervention. This evidence suggests that gender bias in financial advice is largely implicit and that low-cost informational feedback to advisors can meaningfully reduce gender disparities in retirement wealth accumulation.