Gender, Social Value Orientation, and Tax Compliance

Abstract

This article brings an important empirical contribution to the academic literature by examining whether gender differences in tax compliance are due to higher prosociality among women. We conducted a large cross-national tax compliance experiment carried out in different countries—Italy, UK, USA, Sweden, and Romania. We uncover that women declare a significantly higher percentage of their income than men in all five countries. While some scholars have argued that differences in honesty between men and women are mediated by prosociality, we find that women are not more prosocial than men in all countries and we do not find a mediating effect of prosocial behaviour on tax compliance. Though tax evasion is a form of dishonesty, the tax compliance experiment is quite different from an honesty experiment, which is certainly one explanation for the different results. We conclude that although differences in prosociality between men and women seem to be context-dependent, differences in tax compliance are indeed much more consistent.