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Where did the "women are less risky" thing come from? The Bundesbank published a paper about women bankers being riskier. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/cd4a3a

• slurgfest 14y ago
  I can't speak to the application in business. It's a well established idea in biology. Females invest more biologically in eggs and pregnancy. Men may have many more children than women but also have greater risk of having none. Similar patterns show up in lots of areas. At human conception there are significantly more males than females, at birth they are close to 50/50 - males are more fragile. Even after that point, on average, men take more risks, die earlier and are more likely to be murdered. So again, I don't have expertise to know what any of this has to do with who should run a company, the correlation may be extremely dodgy; but men are at a biological level riskier critters than women.
  • kolinko 14y ago
    Any scientific research to support that? Just because you can put a nice story behind a theory doesn't make it true.
    • einhverfr 14y ago
      Some if it ties in with this: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/105013.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/105013.php at least regarding sex at conception. I am not entirely sure about whether we really have hard direct data regarding sex at conception but that's one possibility regarding that data. On the other hand, it's possible that there are biological differences between sperm carrying X and Y chromosomes and that these might be selected for one way or another. However, trans-historically (closer to my field of expertise) it is generally true that men take on riskier endeavors than women do, and that women follow as areas develop. Frontiers generally tend to be nearly exclusively male (at one point the Wild West had a gender ratio of 50 men per woman, and this is not isolated. Consider the early classical practice of having the men march off in search of fortune, for example. The thing to keep in mind here is that women have a narrower window of opportunity to start a family than men do. If you are 40 and male, and you are not married, you could still get married to a younger woman and have kids, but if you are 40 and female, you are less likely to be able to have kids. Therefore men can generally better afford to move into immature markets and riskier endeavors than women can.
      • kolinko 14y ago
        Well, I think the question is not whether an average woman is more or less risky than an average man, but whether an average woman banker/manager is more or less risky than an average man on that position. Think of that one woman per 50 man on the Wild West. How tolerant to risk must she have been to go to a dangerous land populated mostly by men. All of her family must've told her to stay home, and she had no role models to follow. Also, you mentioned that in biology it's well established that women are (inherently?) less adventurous than man. You've got research which talks about sex at conception, but I was asking about a research which proves that any such relation persists beyond conception and is not a result of sociological effects (because we're talking biology here).
        • einhverfr 14y ago
          Well, I wasn't the one who brought up biology and in fact in my brief mention suggested there were some questions. The larger issue is trans-historicly men tend to be, well, pioneers, and women tend to follow and build civilization. To the extent that there is a biological inherent risk aspect, it is because of differences in timeframes to establish a family. Men and women are different in this regard biologically. Men can have kids when relatively old while women cannot. For this reason if you expect someone to take risks while young, this favors men over women, particularly if the risk is that one might not be as established by the time one is, say, 30 years old. It is different, for example, to require an extensive post-doc program followed by a lengthy tenure track in order to get a coveted academic position if you are a man and can delay getting married and having kids than if you are a woman.
        • slurgfest 14y ago
          I wasn't saying anything about business. I was saying something about biology. It's up to you to find what evidence there is for the claim in business. If you want to know about biology, read a biology textbook instead of downvoting people for things you don't like to hear.
    • slurgfest 14y ago
      This is not cutting edge, nor is it remotely original with me, nor is it controversial; go look in an introductory textbook. It's been years since I was in classes about this, all I have done is point out that the idea was not just fabricated on the spot by someone on HN. It's appalling that textbook evolutionary biology gets downvotes as if it were some sort of angry screed or political controversy
• peteretep 14y ago
  Maybe to succeed as a woman in a male-dominated environment like banking, you need to have high testosterone...