Are Men Really the ‘Natural’ Risk Takers?
Deconstructing another cultural myth
It’s another one of those well-worn “everyone knows” narratives that are often touted as truth — men have evolved to be greater risk-takers because you know, successful hunters are more attractive, and women need to be careful because they have babies to raise… blah, blah, blah.
It’s one of those things that sounds plausible at first glance, but once you start deconstructing it and looking at the actual data, it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. What does risk-taking even mean anyhow? Going beyond surface assumptions leads to a story that isn’t quite so pat.
Men do tend to drive fast, have more unprotected sex, and binge drink more often than women, but is that because they are naturally prone to riskier behavior, or is it because these have been societally constructed as “masculine” behaviors that “real men” ought to indulge in? Binge drinking, in particular, has much more serious potential consequences for women — making them easier prey for rapists and sex traffickers. Having unprotected sex has potentially more serious consequences for women as well. Perhaps more women than men have determined these are just not risks they are willing to take because the benefit ratio isn’t very good for them. That’s smart, not timid.
In fact, any in-depth look at risk has to be parsed out by who it is most likely to impact and how. Several studies have noted that white men tend to perceive less risk in situations where other demographics perceive more — perhaps due to a greater base of societal and institutional power and control.
The results showed that white women perceived risks to be much higher than did white men, a result that is consistent with previous studies. However, this gender difference was not true of nonwhite women and men, whose perceptions of risk were quite similar. Most striking was the finding that white males tended to differ from everyone else in their attitudes and perceptions–on average, they perceived risks as much smaller and much more acceptable than did other people. These results suggest that sociopolitical factors such as power, status, alienation, and trust are strong determiners of people’s perception and acceptance of risks.(source)
In the US, pregnancy is about twenty times more likely to result in death than going skydiving. Date rape is one of the most prevalent types of rape, and many, many women consider going out with a new guy to be something that requires extreme planning and caution — often making arrangements to check in with a friend throughout the evening and to let her know if they’d gotten home safely — because dating can be very risky for women.
Going on dates with potentially dangerous strangers and getting pregnant both look like significant routine risk-taking to me. In addition, about 50% of marriages end in divorce and about 75% of divorces are initiated by women. Divorce is something that comes with a lot of social, financial, and emotional risks. Driving fast and unprotected sex aren’t the only risks with significant real-world consequences.
The perceived gender gap in risk-taking would probably decrease significantly if researchers’ questionnaires started to include a broader range of questions. How likely are you to try a complicated new recipe for an important dinner party? How likely are you to risk trolling and harassment by writing a feminist opinion piece? How likely are you to train for a lucrative career in which there’s a high probability of sex-based discrimination and harassment?
In 2019, the Sydney Morning Herald published a story on the rampant sexual harassment, bullying, and misogyny that female surgeons routinely experienced in Australia and New Zealand. It’s something that female doctors, and surgeons, in particular, experience in many countries.
To give you a flavor of professional life as a woman in this field, female trainees and junior surgeons “reported feeling obliged to give their supervisors sexual favours to keep their jobs”; endured flagrantly illegal hostility toward the notion of combining career with motherhood; contended with “boys’ clubs”; and experienced entrenched sexism at all levels and “a culture of fear and reprisal, with known bullies in senior positions seen as untouchable.”
Fine, Cordelia. Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (p. 126). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Similar experiences have often been reported by female police officers. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me like going into those professions is a big risk for women. As the Sydney Morning Herald noted, 60% of medical students in Australia are women, but only about 11% of women doctors are surgeons. Women leave surgical training mid-way more often than men due to both the hostile training environment and a lack of mentors and role models, but even so, women keep boldly entering this highly competitive field.
In the US, only about 13% of police officers are women, so they experience a lot of the same lack of mentoring and support, and in at least some instances, high levels of sexism and harassment as well. In the face of that, it seems pretty silly and condescending to say that women just aren’t naturally up for risk-taking in the same way that men are. Daring to enter traditionally male-dominated fields — something that more and more women are undertaking every year — is demonstrably a big risk for women.
It’s often hypothesized that men are more assertive and competitive at work, with a better track record for negotiating compensation and perks. This must be because men are just naturally greater natural risk-takers, right? Not so fast…
What Columbia University researchers have found is that risk-taking is far from an all-or-nothing quality. Inveterate gamblers may well steer clear of bungee jumping or skydiving. Heavy smokers may be leery about investing in the stock market. Being willing to take a risk in one area of your life does not necessarily indicate a widespread predilection for risking behavior. And in addition, women and men have similar attitudes toward risk, although they may have different perceptions about what is risky or not — often based on societal norms and past experiences.
In a highly gendered world, what reads as something you are willing to stake for a particular gain may differ widely. Social identities, roles, norms, and status all affect how we perceive risk. For example, women are expected to be nice in a way that men aren’t, and this can affect how they are perceived when attempting to negotiate for a raise or a promotion. In one study entitled, “Sometimes It Does Hurt to Ask” researchers noted this:
“We posed the question at the beginning of this article of whether women’s greater reluctance (as compared to men) to initiate negotiations over resources, such as higher compensation, could be explained by the differential treatment of male and female negotiators. The results of these experiments suggest that the answer to this question is yes. In the first three experiments, male evaluators penalized women more than men for attempting to negotiate for higher compensation.”
In other words, the ratio of negative consequences to potential gain may often be significantly higher for women in certain circumstances — making the women not necessarily less risk averse but rather only willing to take risks that have some reasonable probability of positive outcomes.
Exeter University psychologist Michelle Ryan surveyed more than eight hundred managers at a major consultancy firm, and found that women on average were less willing than men to make sacrifices for their career, and to take career risks in order to get ahead. Closer examination revealed that this was because women tended to perceive less benefit in taking risks and making sacrifices. But this was not because they were simply less ambitious. Rather, they had lower expectations of success, fewer role models, less support, and less confidence that their organization was a meritocracy.
Fine, Cordelia. Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society (p. 121). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
What is an acceptable risk with a high rate of potential return for one demographic may look more like a really bad idea for another based on the societal context. As noted by Brescoll, et al in Hard Won and Easily Lost, women leaders in non-gender-congruent occupations tend to be judged more harshly when the risks they take do not pan out. Both men and women tend to be highly aware of how risk-taking is perceived in relation to current gender norms and to often act accordingly.
But assuming that those norms are universal and have always been the same since the beginning of time is yet another mistake. The assumption is that man the hunter evolved to be a risk-taker because this made him look more attractive to women. Aside from the fact that in nearly all forager societies, most of the daily calories come from gathering, supplemented with meat from a hunt, this sort of self-aggrandizing behavior is not condoned, much less rewarded, by hunter-gatherer cultures.
When (anthropologist Richard) Lee asked one of the elders of the group about this practice (of insulting the meat from a kill), the response he received was the following: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.” (source)
Enforced egalitarianism is a hallmark of forager bands and has been hypothesized by many anthropologists to have been a key survival strategy for our Paleolithic ancestors — allowing early humans to survive when other hominid strains died out. Superimposing dominance hierarchy dynamics about showing off and advertising your prowess that have only been around for about 5 thousand years onto the distant past and then claiming it explains the present, is pseudo-scientific.
In addition, most women don’t actually find risk-taking behavior attractive, except in a few particular instances. One of these is if the actual risk is really quite low. For higher risks, it needs to be done in service of something greater than just showing off. “Farthing found that subjects had a preference for the takers of a physical risk only if it was “heroic”, that is it included an altruistic component (e.g. saving someone from drowning in a river, or intervening in an unfair fight). However that means that it might have been only the altruism and not the risk taking that was attractive. Farthing argued that heroism is an attractive feature to potential mates because “a male who takes such altruistic risks for the sake of other people or their children would undoubtedly do the same thing for his mate and her children” (p. 180). He also argued that non-heroic physical risk taking (e.g. engaging in risky sports or defending oneself against a mugger) is unattractive because it increases the likelihood of harm to the risk taker and thus might decrease the ability to care for his or her family.”
I think this may be taking the “everything about attraction is related to a mating strategy” thing a bit too far, but whatever the reasons, in actuality, routinely engaging in risky behavior is not a good way to attract women. Asserting that it is is really just patriarchal norms seeking a way to justify themselves by being reinforced in the cultural narrative. In a dominance hierarchy, the social dynamics are vastly different than in an egalitarian band of foragers where everyone taking care of everyone else is one of the primary survival strategies.
When we note that most women don’t actually find risk-taking behavior all that attractive and even more importantly when we look at all the ways that many women routinely take very high-stakes risks, it becomes apparent that this sort of “men are like this and women are like that” narrative is full of holes — and trying to tie it to the ancient past is even worse.
In general, most people are willing to take calculated risks around some things and not around others — some of which are tied to gender norms and some of which are not. Don’t forget, figuring out which mushrooms were tasty and which ones would kill you was a pretty risky endeavor.
When we look beyond a few examples straight out of the 1950s about how men are supposed to be and how women purportedly are, we see that the broader picture indicates a really quite different dynamic — one where we can’t just pigeon-hole an entire group of people by gender alone. People take risks when they determine that the benefit ratio is satisfactory — something that may vary from person to person for a wide variety of different reasons, at least some of which are related to gender norms. Trying to oversimplify it in order to claim, “Hey, look how tough we are,” is really just kind of silly and certainly not very scientific.
In addition, anyone who thinks that women are naturally risk-averse ought to read up on the Night Witches of WWII. These were young Russian women in their late teens and 20s who signed up to fly low-altitude bombing sorties against the Nazis — and thousands of young women applied for this very dangerous regiment. They flew plywood bi-planes used for crop dusting with open cockpits, and with no navigational instruments, parachutes, or radios under cover of darkness. They carried pistols in case they were shot down — always leaving the last bullet for themselves, if necessary. Their training had been abbreviated, they wore male uniforms that didn’t fit, and they suffered a lot of harassment and disrespect, but the Nazis were terrified of them. So much so that anyone who shot down one of their planes was immediately awarded the German Iron Cross.
More on the Night Witches and other gutsy women of history here.
© Copyright Elle Beau 2023
