Gender, Task Complexity and Risk Taking: Catch 22 for Women

Willingness to take risks is considered a quality of most successful managers (MacCrimmon and Wehrung 1986). There continues to be a societal stereotype, however, that women are not as inclined to engage in risk taking as their male counterparts. Research on whether this stereotype is justified has produced equivocal results, at best. This paper reports on a series of experiments which show there is a relationship between risk taking and task complexity such that the differences between male and female decisions, present in simple tasks, disappear as the tasks become more complex. Possible explanations for this phenomenon are discussed along with implications for women and the practicing manager.