It may not be politically correct to say, but there ARE differences between men and women. One of them is that, generally speaking, men are more willing to take higher risks for money and recognition.
Saying this is politically correct. The contentious issue is the question of why this is so. Is it because society shapes us in such a way that men are more inclined to take risks for money and recognition. This would imply things can change and women can be excellent saturation divers. Or is it because our genes shape us in this way, making it impossible for women to excel at diving.
Or maybe money and recognition aren't that valuable intrinsically and the industry is basically (ab)using men craving for those both. Maybe women are simply much smarter to not choose that line of job in the first place, or it would take a lot more of something else than money and recognition to convince them to take those risks.
That might be true but brings you back to the question why this is so. Are women intrinsically more intelligent due to their gender or does society place different expectations on the upbringing of boys, leading to a different selection of skills that develop. Or is it a mixture of both?
It is because the sex ratio is close to 1:1 at birth yet there need not be 1:1 men:women in adulthood. If men get themselves killed, it doesn't really matter.
It's a physical job. Men are on average stronger. Even though the distribution of strength might not be proportional, the general perception should lead to a manifest self-image simply by association. And it helps that people like me corroborate this, frequently.
Pure strength is not the only metric that is important on most physical jobs. Endurance is another metric and afaik women tend to rate fairly well on that. This is also a mentally tough job, working in confined spaces in the dark with low visibility requires a whole range of attributes other than mere physical strength.
From a biological standpoint, the reason men take more risks (for any reason) is clear.
Take a tribe made of 10 men and 10 women, each women give birth to 4 kids during their life. You need 8 people for a very dangerous task.
Are you going to send men or women? If you send 8 men and they all die, you are left with 10 women and 2 men. The two men can impregnate all the women and you have 40 kids for the next generation. The tribe will soon recover. On the other hand if 8 women die, there will be only 8 kids for the next generation, which is a much bigger hit.
That women are more risk adverse is only natural, and it is indeed the case. In fact, it maye be the most significant non-physical difference between men and women.
As for women possibly being better saturation divers, I don't know. After all, they do pretty well in space, they even seem to have some biological advantage. However, these divers are not just divers, they are also construction workers, and physical strength is important, an area where men have the advantage.
Sex differences in risk-taking behavior is a well documented finding, and that it has an underlying biological cause isn't controversial as far I've seen.
Testosterone is strongly linked to aggression as well as financial/physical risk taking, so part of the difference between sexes is expected on that alone. [1][2]
The evolution of risk taking is actively researched [3], and we see pretty consistent sex based differences across most species.
On an individual level, women who want to take these high risk physical jobs should clearly have equal opportunity to do so. We're just unlikely to ever hit 50/50.
So I’m not sure I’m very convinced by these papers.
The first (nature) paper appears to show that in market traders increased levels of testosterone result in more risk taking.
The third is mostly about fish and other animals, and doesn’t seem hugely relevant (though it’s interesting).
The second seems like the most interesting (MIT press article). They look at risk taking in adolescents. The paper seems to show that testosterone is linked to risk taking in males, but increased (natural) testosterone in females didn’t seem to show much increase in risk taking.
Overall, boys had very slightly riskier behavior than females. From the graphs the error bars are pretty big and the difference in risky behavior is quite small.
The difference doesn’t seem big enough that it would result in skewed gender ratios in jobs for example.
So, if this is well established in the literature, I’d expect to see better results than this. Are there papers that more really show that males are more prone to risky behavior and that this has a biological, rather than social basis?
It makes more sense in nature for females to be more selective than males, since once they choose a mate they have to deal with that choice for a while, resulting in males competing for females. So I think it makes sense that men would naturally be competing for women, and would have to take more risks, and try and get more money/recognition, to do that.
Role models for example. Movie heroes, book or video game protagonists are predominantly male. That shapes perception and expectations of desired and acceptable behavior.
Parents brag about boys taking risk, but never about girls.
To paraphrase real world office debates, basically man dying after they did dangerous "at least knew what he did it for" while woman "stupid did not knew the risk". Judgement without knowing details in both cases. I havent seen dumb female death framed in terms of bravery, but I have seen dum male death framed that way. (This difference likely hurts men more then women imo, most paid jobs are actually safe)
Imo, neither that man nor that women meant to be death.
I guess the parent comment has been edited, because this comment seems to come out of the blue in relation to what the current parent comment says.
My personal opinion is that if you’re going to make statements like this you should back them up.
As a counter example, being a police officer would I imagine not be considered the safest of jobs. But 30% of police officers in the UK are women, and the number is steadily rising:
>As a counter example, being a police officer would I imagine not be considered the safest of jobs.
It isn't particularly dangerous in the UK. There were no officers killed in the line of duty in 2016, 2014, 2011, 2010 and 2008. Police officers have a relatively high risk of being the victim of an assault, but they're far less likely to be killed or seriously injured at work than workers in agriculture, construction, civil engineering, motor vehicle repair or waste management.
The number is steadily rising, and I’d expect it to be historically lower so it’s not unexpected.
However, I’m not making any strong assertion one way or the other. The parent I was replying to effective said “it’s because men and women are different” without providing any evidence whatsoever.
Yes there are differences - I wonder makes it necessary to protect yourself against contrarians with the "politically correctness" tagging of your statement?
