For your first question, I can only extrapolate from my own experience. Having, thankfully, never been in an avalanche or with a group that triggered one, take

For your first question, I can only extrapolate from my own experience. Having, thankfully, never been in an avalanche or with a group that triggered one, take that for what it's worth. That said, the groups I've been out of bounds with have guys outnumbering girls at a ratio well over 10:1, so simple odds are against the guys. The few times there have been women with us, they've tended to be a bit more level-headed and safety-conscious. (As always, the plural of anecdote is not data.) Your second question doesn't really make sense. First, there's no "protecting" someone from an avalanche. In a slide, you're looking at kilotons of frozen water moving towards you at a speed limited only by gravity and the slope of the mountain face it's falling down. If you're lucky, you're "only" buried in something whose density upon settling approaches that of concrete, and not carried into the trees at speeds that will pulp you on impact. Moreover, when you're riding out of bounds, you take your runs one at a time, precisely because of the avalanche risk. If there is a slide, the rest of the group will come looking for you once it has subsided. The odds of finding one person buried in an avalanche are bad enough; looking for more than one at a time pretty well guarantees someone's not coming home that day -- or ever again.