Is women's stereotypical timidity damaging their financial and career prospects?

An often expressed layman intuition is that women exhibit less risk-taking behavior than men. Statistics consistently show that men will more often engage in “risky” behaviors (including criminal activity, for example). Indeed, there is an extensive collection of literature on the topic of risk-assessment processes in men versus women.


Here’s an overview of the research in this topic:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B7P5N-4SYS65G-4G/2/982a686c9779d5fde2be323032f480e6

I’d like to point out in particular one of the studies covered in this overview:


Gysler, M., Kruse, J.B., Schubert, R. (2002). “Ambiguity and Gender Differences in Financial Decision-Making: An Experimental Examination of Competence and Confidence Effects”.

Here is the full article if you’re interested:
http://www.peel.pitt.edu/esa2003/papers/schubert_ambiguitygender.pdf)

The authors suggest that “women's risk-aversion diminishes as their expertise increases. The interactions have just the opposite effect for men, with risk aversion increasing with expertise and confidence.” Women become more risk-taking when they are making decisions in a domain in which they are expert, while in men we see an opposite trend. Why is it the case that women become more risk-prone as they become more financially savvy, or equally curiously, why should it differ between men and women?

Whatever the mechanism, these studies in risk-taking behavior hold relevant implications for women as consumers, investors and entrepreneurs. Is risk aversion in part responsible for the discrepencies we see between the number of male and female entrepreneurs?

Sure, it’s possible. The Wall Street Journal blogged about something to this effect last year:
(http://blogs.wsj.com/independentstreet/2008/09/02/does-an-aversion-to-risk-taking-hold-back-women-entrepreneurs/tab/article/).

I have doubts as to the hypothesizing around the factors that are holding back female entrepreneurs, however. Is risk-taking itself a prerequisite to entrepreneurial success, or is it merely necessary to secure the money from male-oriented venture capitalists and clients? Is risk-taking, in itself, what entrepreneurs need to launch a successful venture, or does it only seem this way because men, who are so often in control of capital, perceive risk-proneness as a desirable personal quality?

If the features of maleness are over time associated with entrepreneurial prowress, how we can disentangle the confoudning factors? I argue that we cannot know if risk taking is a desireable quality in entrepreneurs.