[hacker789]

Across all cultures (perhaps across all of history), women are more risk averse.

In fact, feminist activists didn't push to get more women into tech until tech was a higher paying, lower risk endeavor.

Only then did it become scandalous that young women were choosing different career paths (but interestingly, the fact that young women are earning more than young men and graduating from college in far greater rates than young men isn't scandalous).

[001sky]

women are more risk averse

I think this is misleading. Men and women face different risks, and heterodox strategies are not indicative of very much. First, you need to be careful how you infer "risk taking" from "not taking the same bets", because the actual riks taken is a portfolio riks calculation which is blind. Second, you don't have any data to infer anyrthing about the quality of the risk taking they are in fact taking; that is in terms of actual/realize and even provability weighted expected returns. To give one crass example, a women could take a strategy of legal ownership of "high risk realized assets" through marriage. This is a "high-risk strategy", but it is also empirically true that many rich men are married.[1] Of course, the odds of success in this strategy are also not evenly distributed amongst women as a group, either. Another person could look at that and say that marriage to a rich person is a "risk avoidance" strategy...and again, this may or may not be true. Because wealth and genetic fitness need not correlate, and so your frame of reference on the purpose of strategy quickly turns into quite a bit more complex calculation.

[1] Marriage as a legal contract has a financial value; a derivative, with contingent claims on of the underlying (asset) value of couple's cumulative/aggregate incomes.

[jfarmer]

You and your complexifyin' aren't welcome around here, friend! All that nuance just makes our arguments much harder to make. You'd best take it elsewhere.

[jmagoon]

Do you have any evidence to back up your broad-brushed claims?

And who are these "feminist activist" strawmen(straw-women?) you have set up?

[newnewnew]

5 minutes of googling:

"MEN, WOMEN AND RISK AVERSION:EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE" - http://aysps.gsu.edu/isp/files/ISP_Ind_3.pdf

"Sex Differences in Everyday Risk-Taking Behavior in Humans" - http://www.epjournal.net/wp-content/uploads/ep062942.pdf

Reality fits egalitarian beliefs quite poorly.

[mistermann]

I think part of the reason these discussions never get anywhere is because of blatant dishonesty in discussions. You actually think there is no "feminist activist" movement?

[rodgerd]

> women are more risk averse.

When was the last time you did something as risky as get pregnant?