Free Our Turn by Kirstine; Stewart

what do we know from risk? It’s a bias about the real nature of women that media and popular culture have spun into the contemporary workplace. Some studies have even considered whether the global financial crisis of 2008 could have been averted if more women than cowboys had been in charge. But there’s real danger in putting stock in prehistoric depictions that suggest women, by nature, are prone to play it safe, because the characterization can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The hard fact is that females are socialized to be restrained. Even before girls go to preschool, they’ve ingested the cultural expectation that good girls sit still and behave, and they’re rewarded when they do just that. This is why so many girls are at the head of the class.
    But in the business world, that mode of the behaviour is the ball and chain we have to sever to succeed. And there is lots of evidence that we’re making that break. The trouble is that for too long the very term “risk” has been defined in masculine terms, both physical and financial, as though risk-taking is simply about going brave with biceps and piles of cash. But in the workplace, a risk is any situation that carries the potential for negative consequences. Any time I changed a program lineup, altered a schedule or chose to invest in a new show, I was taking a risk, especially if there was opposition. The risk was not just that ratings would suffer if I made the wrong decision, but that my credibility as a leader was on the line. Failure in my job was public.
    Increasingly, researchers are recognizing that there’s more than one kind of risk, that men and women tend to perceiverisk differently and that when you take these distinctions into account, you actually find that the old saw about women being risk-averse is mostly a steaming hill of myth. If girls have been brought up with expectations of being seen but not heard, boys have learned that boyish behaviour includes pushing boundaries and breaking rules. All grown up, men tend to define risks in terms of the visible, as in betting the farm or bungee jumping. Women, on the other hand, are more apt to define risk in terms of the invisible, as in taking a position that puts your personal capital on the line. Often, that includes the sense that there’s a risk to speaking up—as in raising your voice, if not your hand.
    That’s not just my take, that’s at the core of the more recent explorations into gender and risk-taking. A 2012 Tufts University study, for instance, backed by the Institute for New Thinking in Economics, reviewed 28 papers on the subject and found that the gender differences around risk-taking have been exaggerated. A survey of 650 female managers by the Simmons School of Management in Boston found about 80 percent of the women reported regularly taking risks in their professional lives around things like pursuing a major change initiative, or new programs, but that these pursuits are not recognized as risk-taking in part because of societal expectations that women are risk-averse. Columbia Business School’s report in 2011 concluded that both sexes are equally risk-prone, but in different ways. Simply put: men took more risks with money, women with social situations, a category that included things like launching a new career in your mid-thirties and sharing an unpopular opinion in a work meeting. And finally, there’s the added nuance of context. As a recent Wall Street Journal article explained it, using the example of a conservative money manager who likes to ride the fastest motorcycle on the highway in his off-hours: even the cautious can become daredevils in the right context. Today’s context demands that everyone be at least a little daredevil.
    In the digital age, leaders need to innovate constantly, moving in directions no one has ever has gone before. Everything is risky. We are living in the time of the unorthodox. In many