Gender Gaps in the Context of Cryptocurrency Literacy: Evidence from Survey Data in Europe and Asia

Although the term cryptocurrency is widely used nowadays, it is unclear if people have basic knowledge about the underlying concepts. Literature on financial literacy posits that often such knowledge is missing, especially for women. In this study, we utilize survey data across five nationalities in Europe and Asia and analyze differences between self-assessed expertise and actual performance in various cryptocurrency knowledge items. We find that women on average report a lower self-assessed cryptocurrency literacy than men do. At the same time, we obtain the surprising result that women on average are not less literate than men, and in some literacy items, they even perform better than men. Further analysis shows that female self-assessed experts indeed perform better than female self-assessed non-experts. On the contrary, male self-assessed experts do not perform better than male self-assessed non-experts. Hence, women have a more accurate evaluation of their cryptocurrency literacy than men who exhibit overconfidence in their abilities. We also find that both men and women generally have an upward biased perception of their abilities, i.e., they are not aware of the fact that the absolute quality of their answers is far away from one would expect from a cryptocurrency expert.