Hacker News Reader

Comment by lambdaelite | Hacker News Reader

> A dual income couple can tolerate more risk, but in my experience they are unwilling. After marriage, a couple's risk tolerance skews a lot closer to a woman's risk tolerance than to a man's.

How is someone's gender in any way relevant to their financial risk tolerance?

View on HN

The mechanisms are minimally known (it's believed to be linked to testosterone), but lower female risk tolerance is fairly well established. See this report and the sources it cites:

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/36/15268.full

And interestingly, this study was just posted here today, showing that testosterone levels fall in married men: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/13129483

I think caution is advised at applying these studies broadly, as you are doing. Not only are they done on WEIRD populations, but a limited subset of that grouping.

We are discussing the career habits of WEIRD populations, right?

The same pattern holds anecdotally in many other cultures I'm familiar with (Indian, southern African). Do you have any anecdotes or other evidence suggesting women are equally or more risk averse than men?

Anecdotes? Sure. My wife loves to trade options. I generally avoid them, except for buy-writes. Across investments, she enjoys taking higher risk positions than I.

I can't say that gender doesn't play a role, and it would make sense if gender were a factor, but I don't see how it could be anything close to a dominant factor.

By "anecdote", I meant "a culture or subgroup where women are reputed to be more risk taking than men", not "an individual example". No one disputes that individual examples can probably be found in any culture, and their existence doesn't contradict my claim.

...I don't see how it could be anything close to a dominant factor.

Suppose it were a dominant factor. How would the world be drastically different than it is today?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com