Why women are more risk-averse
Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's misogyny...
Hello, and thank you so much for being here and for giving me a couple of weeks off to enjoy the Eid holidays with my family. I’m now back and raring to go. From here on out, my weekly long-reads will come on a Saturday, with one each month for free and the others (plus sporadic extras and audio content too) for paid subscribers. If you’re already reading my work in full, thank you. If you’re not, and you’d like to, please do click below. Exciting things are coming…
What makes a person brave?
It’s a question I’ve been pondering a lot over the last few weeks, as the nation went on holiday as a whole for Eid, as life slowed down and I had the headspace for some contemplation.
I mused on it as I skied, slowly and mildly fearfully, down a mountain, of course. But mostly, I’ve considered it with regard to far more mundane things – pondering what makes someone brave at work, for example, or sartorially, or financially.
Are people who take risks born with the genes to do it, bravery built into their DNA like the coding for blue eyes or good bone structure? Or is it, as I’m increasingly coming to believe, environmental, driven by the amount of risk we believe we face each day as we head out into the world?
To put it simply, do safe people take more risks?
“Obviously there are things wrong with this place too,” my mate mumbled through a mouthful of sushi, waving her chopsticks in the air to punctuate her point. “I’m just saying that I really like not worrying that I’ll be raped every time I walk home on my own.”
The men looked on, aghast.
“How often did you used to worry about that at home?” her husband asked, quietly, his own chopsticks dangling uselessly above his plate, his jaw doing something similar.
“Oh, every bloody day,” she replied, casually spearing a bit of tuna as my mate and I nodded beside her, her revelation clearly far less shocking to the women at the table.
It had started as a fairly anodyne chat about the pros and cons of Dubai life, a stalwart conversation on those sorts of evenings where partners are introduced to each other and everyone begins the evening on their best behaviour, pretending the women wouldn’t usually be oversharing by starters. Quickly though, it became clear that the benefits the men recognised were quite notably different from our own, safety-focussed highlights.
It’s a point of difference that hit home again last night as my friend and I sat in the audience of comedian Katherine Ryan’s first UAE comedy set. Obviously, the blow-job and Barbie jokes got plenty of laughs too, but the loudest cheer of the night came when, in describing Dubai’s shiny newness, she summarised it as “like America, but with better women’s rights”.
It went down a storm, not just because the audience knew it to be true, but because it’s a reality so rarely acknowledged by ‘outsiders’ to the city. The fact that this is a brilliant place to be a woman often feels like a secret, an air of IYKYK about the whole thing.
Of course, it shouldn’t really be a revelation. The UN’s annual Gender Inequality Index this year ranked the UAE in seventh place globally – the first time a Middle Eastern country had made it into the top ten – while the UK dropped to 28th and the USA to a horrifying 44. Yet, despite the statistical evidence that women here are thriving, their ever-increasing role in society plotted dramatically on a graph, still so many in the west choose to insist it can’t possibly be true.
Still, it’s one thing for UN researchers to check boxes – representation in the workplace, tick, reproductive health, tick, empowerment, tick – another to witness how that affects us in everyday reality.
And increasingly, I’m starting to think the key impact for women is this: because we are safe, we are free to be brave.
“It is widely acknowledged that men, across many domains, take more risks than women,” explains Dr Chris Dawson, associate professor in business economics at the University of Bath School of Management and the author of 2023 study Gender differences in optimism, loss aversion and attitudes toward risk. “These differences in how the sexes view risk can have significant effects.
“For instance, differences between the sexes in risk taking can explain why women are less likely to be entrepreneurs, are underrepresented in high-paying jobs and upper management, and less likely to invest their wealth in equities markets than men. Despite these important implications, we still know very little about why women take fewer risks than men,” he explains.
Dr Dawson’s team recently attempted to bridge that knowledge gap, delving into what could lie behind gender differences with regards to risk and reward, and it had a startling conclusion:
“When thinking about risky choices, people tend to assess the probability of losing something alongside an evaluation of how painful that loss would be. I found that women take less risks than men as they focus more on the possibility of losing and anticipate experiencing more pain from potential losses.”
Put simply, we fear the outcomes of risk more than men do – and who could blame us when, so often, those outcomes are so much more dangerous?
As women, so many of us were raised to be risk-averse in order to keep ourselves safe. The dangers of simply going about our lives are reiterated to us time and time again in childhood and adulthood alike, whether in whispered conversations about dodgy guys in the office or in loud, public ones, headlines warning us about the latest attack on a woman who was just trying to exist in the world.
Back when I was attempting to run The Flock as a business, Sarah Everard was murdered by a policeman. In the days and weeks that followed, as we were told to hail down buses if we feared for our safety and the women who came out to demonstrate the utter nonsense of that advice were manhandled by police on camera, I felt scared. We all did. My inbox was stuffed with pitches from women discussing their own experiences of sexual violence and as I waded through their emails, it was hard not to feel hopeless. One in three women will experience sexual violence in their lifetimes. That statistic had never felt more real, more threatening, or more invasive.
Of course, I’m not naive enough to pretend bad things don’t happen here. Globally, 80% of rape is committed by someone known to the victim, in relationships where trust and respect should be a given. Bad things happen behind closed doors the world over.
But the impact of that other 20% can’t be overlooked. It is that 20% that keeps us at home after dark in winter, that has us carrying keys between our fingers and telling our friends to text us the minute they get home. It is that 20% that creates the constant background hum of fear so many of us come to accept as a normal soundtrack to our lives, that reminds us in every minute of our day that we are less than, second class citizens in a world of men. And it is that 20% that my friends and I feel freed from here, in a country where we can walk or run at all hours without fearing what, or who, might be around the next corner.
Here, my anxiety runs at a lower ebb. I worry, of course, about rent increases and the exorbitant price of school, about the fact I don’t have a pension and about what would happen if one of us lost our jobs and, subsequently, our right to live here. But I do not worry about being attacked as I walk home and the effect, over time, is profound.
Because just as fear spoils everything it touches, over time, in its absence, bravery seeps into the gaps. My friends here are bold. Unafraid. And while I admired that about them when I arrived, assuming they were born that way, the longer I live here, the more I find that I too am becoming braver, more open to risk.
Three years ago, I spent four hours trying to make a two-minute Instagram video, hating my face and my voice more with every take. Anxiety thrummed through me for the duration, every take leaving me feeling more vulnerable and exposed. Yesterday, I presented a three-hour talk radio show on a network with 3.5million listeners a week. Presenting is an ambition I barely voiced at home. Today, without the inner-monologue of risk telling me to pipe down and stay small, I am no longer afraid.
“You can go start your nights now,” Katherine Ryan shouts over raucous applause, preparing to leave the stage with an acknowledgement that this, to coin a cliché, is a city that never sleeps, that eats dinner at midnight and shops at 1am on weekends.
And so we do as instructed. We eat. We chat. We laugh. And at the end of it all, my friend and I hug and set off in opposite directions to walk to our cars, our phones and our keys still in our bags, hands and heads free.
No-one says to text when we get home. There’s no need. What a bloody privilege.
