Testosterone Rex

by Cordelia Fine

  Dozens? Hundreds? Sure—if you’re a red deer, or the leader of an ancient Mongol empire. While Hoffman and Yoeli’s arguments mostly refer to the “fighting” part of Darwin’s sexual selection theory (intrasexual selection), other researchers suggest that risk taking also adds to men’s appeal as a mate; the “charming” part of Darwin’s subtheory (or intersexual selection). As psychologists Michael Baker Jr. and Jon Maner explain:

  Among men, risky behaviors have potential for displaying to potential mates characteristics such as social dominance, confidence, ambition, skill and mental acuity, all of which are highly desired by women seeking a romantic partner.2

  But for women, there are no such benefits to be gained from taking risks. This is because—the authors seem to try to put it as tactfully as they can—“men tend to desire women with characteristics that signal high reproductive capacity (e.g., youth) rather than characteristics that might be signaled by risk-taking.”3 In other words, so long as the hair is glossy, the skin smooth, and the hip-to-waist ratio pleasing, then a cringingly low sense of self-worth, apathy, incompetence, and stupidity are relative trifles, more easily overlooked from the male perspective.

  Having drawn on a vintage version of sexual selection to claim an evolutionary imperative for male risk taking, the next obvious step is to argue that this is a major contributor to persistent sex inequalities, helping to explain why fame, fortune, and corner offices are disproportionately acquired by men. Hoffman and Yoeli, for instance, argue that

  stocks have higher average returns than bonds, and competitive jobs can be quite lucrative. These rewards make gender differences in risk preferences one of the pre-eminent causes of gender difference in the labor market.4

  The reference to competitive jobs points to a related explanation for occupational inequalities also much in vogue within the economics community: competition. Competition also involves risk taking since outcomes are uncertain, and the possible gains have to be weighed against the costs of taking part and defeat.5 Thus:

  Over the past decade, economists have become increasingly interested in investigating whether gender differences in competitiveness may help explain why labor market differences persist. If women are more reluctant to compete, then they may be less likely to seek promotions or to enter male-dominated and competitive fields.6

  This leaves some mysteries to be explained—like young British women’s considerable interest in competing for a place in the highly competitive, now slightly female-dominated, undergraduate courses of medicine and dentistry.7 But even setting such issues aside, unravelling strand by strand this popular account of risk taking as an essential masculine trait reveals that just about every assumption on which it is based is wrong.

  ALTHOUGH THE INSIGHT WILL probably fail to bring excitement to your next trip to the supermarket, there is an element of uncertainty to everything we do. Risk taking, in everyday understanding, is an action that potentially enables us to achieve a desired goal or benefit, but that also brings the possibility that we will fail, or something will go wrong. As a consequence, we may lose out on something we had, or could have had for sure (the kids’ college fund, an unblemished reputation, the steady income from a government bond, a left arm) or, despite costly efforts, fail to gain something we hoped for (a date, a bulging pension fund, a prestigious promotion, a gold medal, the best-selling feminist science book the world has ever known). It’s long been assumed that the propensity for risk taking is a stable personality trait—that is, a particular individual will consistently tend to seek, or avoid, risks in every realm of life. Indeed, for many years psychologists used measures of risk taking that added up a person’s willingness to take risks in several different domains (like health, investments, and career) to yield a single risk-taking score.8 Many economists, meanwhile, study risk taking by presenting participants with series of carefully designed lottery tasks, in which people choose between, say, $5 for sure or an 80 per cent chance of $10. The assumption is apparently that economists can infer “the” risk-taking profile of a person from his or her selections.9

  The long-held belief that everyone can be neatly located at a point on a single continuum between “risk taker” and “risk avoider” fits nicely with the expectation for “a taste for competitive risk taking to be an evolved aspect of masculine psychology as a result of sexual selection.”10 Males, according to this view, are clustered mostly over on the risk-taking side, women on the careful end.

  However, for decades there have been indications that risk taking isn’t a one-dimensional personality trait: instead, there are “insurance-buying gamblers” and “skydiving wallflowers,” as one group of researchers put it.11 An early study of more than five hundred business executives, for example, looked at their preferences across a variety of risky choices, like business and personal investments, complex financial choice dilemmas, the amount of their own wealth held in risky assets, as well as non-financial risks. Clearly, if risk taking were a stable personality trait, then someone who tended to take risks in one area of decision making would also tend to report being a risk taker in the other domains. Yet this simply wasn’t so. Knowing the riskiness of an executive’s personal wealth strategy, for instance, told you nothing about how he’d behave in a business investment context.12

  To investigate this surprising pattern more closely, Columbia University’s Elke Weber and colleagues asked several hundred U.S. undergraduates how likely they would be to take risks in six different domains: gambling, financial, health, recreational, social, and ethical decisions. Again, a person’s risk-taking propensity didn’t follow any kind of consistent pattern across the different domains—that is, the person who would happily blow a week’s wages at the races was no more likely to leap from a bridge attached to a rubber cord, invest in speculative stock, ask their boss for a raise, have unprotected sex, or steal an additional TV cable connection, than was someone who’d as soon flush dollar bills down the toilet as put them on a horse.13 Researchers drew the same conclusion a few years later in a study that deliberately recruited people on the basis of their affinity to a particular kind of risk: like skydivers, smokers, casino gamblers, and members of stock-trading clubs. Once again, risk taking in one domain didn’t extend to others. So gamblers, say, unsurprisingly stood out as the most risk taking when it came to questions about betting. But they were no more risk taking than the other groups, including even a group of health-risk-averse gym members, when it came to questions about recreational or investment risks.14

  To see the problem this creates for the idea of risk taking as an essential masculine trait, ask yourself which group are the “real” men, or show a properly evolved masculine psychology: the sky-divers, or the traders? That we expect Testosterone Rex to create an all-around risk taker is implicit in Hoffman and Yoeli’s remark that men are “more likely [than women] to die in a car accident while speeding in the Ferrari they bought with their stock-market earnings.” But as we’ve just seen, the reckless Ferrari driver might well prefer bonds to stocks. (That hypothetical ass probably inherited his wealth.) The pure, unadulterated daredevil no doubt exists, but such individuals are statistical exceptions to the general rule that people are fascinatingly idiosyncratic and multifaceted when it comes to risk.

  So what makes someone eager to take risks in one domain, but reluctant in another? It turns out to be risk takers’ less negative perception of the risks and more positive perception of the benefits, Weber and colleagues found.15 The study of the skydivers, gamblers, smokers, and stock traders came to a similar conclusion. The risk takers in this study didn’t like risk per se any more than did the risk-averse gym members. Rather, they perceived greater benefits in their particular pocket of risk taking, and this explained why they took risks that others avoided, and took one kind of risk rather than another. Similarly, contra common lore, entrepreneurs don’t have a more indulgent, risk-loving attitude than do others towards the possibility of losing large sums of money; rather, they have gr
eater confidence that everything will work out just fine.16

  In fact, people are generally mildly risk averse.17 This may at first seem to defy belief. However, Chancing It author Ralph Keyes drew exactly the same conclusion, based on extensive interviews about risk with people from many walks of life. One of his interviewees was the wire-walker Philippe Petit, famous for the remarkable feat of walking a wire strung a quarter of a mile high between the Twin Towers. However, Petit emphatically described himself to Keyes as “absolutely the contrary of a daredevil,” adamantly declaring that “in no way, shape or form did he consider himself to be a taker of risks.”18 I was reminded of this remark at an extravagant magic show I saw recently with my children. In the melodramatic final act, an escape artist was handcuffed, then lowered upside down and padlocked into a snugly fitting glass tank of cold water, armed with only a single bobby pin with which to effect his escape. As we complacently watched the proceedings from the comfort of our seats, the master of ceremonies emphasized the extreme danger of the situation. Yet clearly, the theatre would have been heaving with the rush of parents clamping hands over children’s eyes if there had been even a modest possibility that an afternoon’s treat at the theatre would include witnessing a man drown on stage. By way of a less spectacular example of the principle that risk is in the eye of the beholder, my father, sister, and I can reliably evoke horror and fear in dinner guests with our blasé attitudes towards health and safety in food storage and preparation. Questions like Which is your board for chopping meat? from helpful guests are invariably met with blank, uncomprehending stares. But none of us Fines think we are dicing with danger when we dice vegetables on a board smeared with raw chicken. We simply have a profound (and so far fully justified) confidence that festering microbes are no match for the notoriously robust Fine constitution.

  The critical point here is that “the risk in a given situation is inherently subjective, varying from one individual to the next.”19 It’s simply not possible to assess the “objective” characteristics of a risky situation, then infer a person’s appetite for risk from the decision she or he makes. Again, this resonates with the conclusion Keyes draws. “Repeatedly,” he writes, “I’ve discovered that those who are apparently taking big risks turned out on closer examination to be risking little; little of value, that is.” In a rhetorical question that pointedly emphasizes the subjectivity of the potential losses and gains at stake, he asks: “If you risk a life you don’t value, have you taken a risk?” 20

  The importance of subjectivity in the perception of risks and benefits for humanity’s colourful diversity of risk taking turns out to be equally crucial for understanding sex differences. Contrary to what many might assume, women and men have similar risk attitudes, Weber and colleagues found. For the same subjectively perceived risk and benefit, they are equally likely to tempt fate. When men and women do diverge in risk-taking propensity, it is because they perceive the risks and benefits differently.21 So are men inherently constituted to perceive risks more positively, making them more inclined to take them? A closer look at the actual pattern of sex differences in risk taking reveals important nuances that make this unworkable as an explanation.

  A good starting point is a large meta-analysis that collated studies of female/male differences in risk taking across a variety of domains (like hypothetical choices, drinking, drugs, sexual activity, and driving), and across five different age groups from middle childhood to adulthood.22 This analysis did indeed lead to the conclusion that males are more risk taking than females, on average. But about half of the differences were very modest, and in 20 per cent of cases they were even in the “wrong” direction (that is, there was greater female risk taking). The meta-analysis also revealed changeable patterns of difference depending on the age group and the kind of risk. For example, studies of eighteen- to twenty-one-year olds found that males were a little more likely, on average, to report drinking and drug taking, and risky sexual activities. But for older adults, this sex difference was almost exactly reversed. Nor was there any obvious pattern in the effect of age on sex differences. This is surprising: if risk taking evolved to increase reproductive success, you’d presumably expect an especially clear divergence of the sexes following pubescence. The traditional view of risk taking as a masculine trait therefore requires revision, the researchers concluded, in the face of evidence that “risk taking… does not seem to manifest itself in a simple or constant way across ages or contexts.”23

  That only some domains favour male risk taking leads to the important point that, given an imperfect world in which people can and do die by falling out of bed or accidentally swallowing toothpicks, researchers have to make decisions about the kinds of risks they decide to investigate. With risk taking intimately linked with masculinity in our minds (it’s no mere coincidence, surely, that business jargon for a bold vision is a big, hairy, audacious goal), it’s easy to fail to notice what doesn’t tend to make it onto the questionnaires. What about the surprisingly dangerous sport of cheerleading, or galloping across a field on a horse, or Bingo? As University of Massachusetts Boston economist Julie Nelson notes, although women routinely take risks, these often seem to slip under the research radar.24 For example, with divorce rates hovering close to 50 per cent, being the one to quit or scale back your job when children arrive is a significant economic risk. Going on a date can end in sexual assault. Leaving a marriage is financially, socially, and emotionally risky. In the United States, being pregnant is about twenty times more likely to result in death than is a skydive.25 And simply slipping on a pair of high heels in the morning increases the risk of chronic pain, irreversible leg tendon damage, osteoarthritis of the knee, plantar fasciitis, sciatica,26 and (if you will forgive just one more technical term) the painful and embarrassing condition of fallingflatonyourfaceitis.27 None of which is to say that existing assessments of sex differences in risk taking aren’t informative, interesting, and valid. However, they also reflect implicitly gendered assumptions about what risk taking is. The reported gender gap in risk taking would almost certainly narrow if researchers’ questionnaires started to include more items like How likely is it that you would bake an impressive but difficult soufflé for an important dinner party, risk misogynist backlash by writing a feminist opinion piece, or train for a lucrative career in which there’s a high probability of sex-based discrimination and harassment?

  Indeed, there are already documented exceptions to the notion of risk taking as a masculine trait. A number of studies have found that women are at least as willing as men to take social risks (like admitting that their tastes are different from those of their friends, or disagreeing with their father on a major issue).28 Women were also found to be more likely than men to report that they would take risks in situations in which there was a small chance of benefit for a small fixed cost (such as trying to sell an already-written screenplay to a Hollywood studio, or calling a radio station running a promotion in which the twelfth caller receives money).29 So why do perceptions of risks and benefits apparently differ between the sexes in some realms but not others? One obvious answer is that some activities—like unprotected sex or excessive drinking—may actually be objectively more risky for females. Risk researchers have also found that both knowledge and familiarity in a particular domain reduces perceptions of risk.30 Plausibly, men may tend to be relatively more knowledgeable or familiar with some of the risky activities that tend to feature in surveys (like sports betting, financial investments, and motorcycle riding).

  The point is that an “unruly amalgam of things” underlies choices, as Harvard University legal scholar Cass Sunstein puts it: “aspirations, tastes, physical states, responses to existing roles and norms, values, judgments, emotions, drives, beliefs, whims.”31 And so, we’re not only sensitive to the material benefits and costs when we make choices, Sunstein argues, but also to the less tangible effects a particular choice could have on self-concept and reputation. In a gendered world, these impacts ar
e inevitably different for females and males. (Recall, for example, the different anticipated sexual pleasure and cost to reputation of a casual sexual encounter revealed by Terri Conley and colleagues’ research, described in Chapter 2.) A striking demonstration comes from research investigating the risks people perceive from technological, lifestyle, and environmental hazards (like nuclear power, smoking, and ozone depletion). These studies routinely find that women perceive higher risks to themselves, family, and society from such hazards.32 For instance, James Flynn and colleagues surveyed more than fifteen hundred U.S. households and found that women on average perceived higher risks across the board.33 The Testosterone Rex explanation of this would be that women, as the nurturers of precious offspring, have evolved to be more cautious about threats to physical health. However, Flynn and colleagues then subdivided the sample by ethnicity as well as sex, and discovered that one subgroup stood out from all the rest. Society seemed a significantly safer place to white males than it did to all other groups, including nonwhite men. What on first inspection seemed like a sex difference was actually a difference between white males and everyone else.

  Flynn and colleagues then established that it was a particular subset of white males who were particularly cavalier about risks: those who, in response to the social justice movement’s currently fashionable suggestion to “check your privilege,” would take significantly longer than others to complete the task. These men were well educated, rich, and politically conservative, as well as more trusting of institutions and authorities, and opposed to a “power to the people” view of the world. A number of studies have now replicated this so-called “white male effect” with other large U.S. samples,34 and the research points to it being “not so much a ‘white male effect’ as a ‘white hierarchical and individualistic male effect.’”35 While I could tell you the kinds of statements these men tend to agree with (We have gone too far in pushing equal rights in this country.… A lot of problems in our society today come from the decline in the traditional family), and disagree with (Sometimes government needs to make laws that keep people from hurting themselves.… It’s society’s responsibility to make sure everyone’s basic needs are met…) it might be easier and quicker to simply picture Glenn Beck.