[shareme]

I disagree, one of the highest risks currently is:

-Marriage -Getting Married to raise a family

Most of those have failure rates higher than starting a small business...and some would argue its approaching the risk level of startups.

Women on the whole are no more or less risk averse than Men.

[electromagnetic]

I'd wholly disagree, women on the whole are more risk averse than men, it's everywhere in society. Women take less dangerous jobs regularly. More men die in work place accidents, because men take the risky jobs, more men die in the military because more men join it and take the risky jobs.

I work in construction, it's not high-risk but it's not office-job safe and we get higher pay than average and the company advertises to men and women. Our office has 4 female workers and 1 male (the owner), but we've only ever had 1 female employee outside the office and I believe she was the only one to ever apply and we have a fairly high turnover.

Why is our job not getting an equal number of applicants if women are just as risk taking as men because jobs are advertised to both.

[LaGrange]

"more men die in the military because more men join it"

Ooh, what a great example that women are (generally) encouraged to take less risks, while men are (generally) encouraged to take more risks.

Not that some brain function differences are impossible, but assumptions about brain function seem more risky (sorry) than assumptions about cultural conditioning. Until we can get an ethical double-blind study on a large group of women with perfectly controlled upbringing, or at least a good study including some hypothetical culture that encourages women to take risks (not the same as matriarchal), I think it's better to assume cultural differences.

[adamesque]

Perceived risk is the metric to look at here, but I think you probably know that.

[kgo]

40-50% of marriages end in divorce.

50% of small businesses will be gone in five years. 80% in ten. That's across the board, not just high-risk tech startups.

[tomjen3]

Sure but in those 50% will be a lot of businesses that where part time and where never meant to go on forever.

And if you remove the startups from the number, more than 50% of businesses succeed for five years.