Gender & risk-taking

In my quest to find more ways to procrastinate from dissertation-editing, I wound up skimming Harvard Business Review. In it there was an article entitled Do Women Take as Many Risks as Men?. It noted certain effects like, to quote a cited paper, that "stress amplifies gender differences in strategies used during risky decisions, as males take more risk and females take less risk under stress". What you also find is the following:

Risk-taking role models of both genders are important in an increasingly complex world. When facing a risky decision, leaders must weigh a lot of factors. Two of the biggest are, first, the likelihood that the risk in question will help hit strategic objectives and, second, the effect the risk will have on people involved. Accounting for one without the other is a recipe for disaster. In my consulting practice I've noticed a tendency for men to put a stronger emphasis on the former and women on the latter. Recent research by Seda Ertac and Mehmet Y. Gurdal supports this observation. To me, this tendency is further evidence that the most successful risk taking is a collaborative effort between men and women (and likely across other differences as well).

The article's author then argues that

... [t]he trouble is that historically risk-taking has been framed so narrowly that it skews our perceptions. For example, the majority of studies that point to men having a greater inclination for risk-taking define risk in physical and financial terms. They don't point to risks like standing up for what's right in the face of opposition, or taking the ethical path when there's pressure to stray — important risks that I've found women are particularly strong at taking. If these sorts of risks were fully accounted for in our business culture, would it balance the gender perception? I think it would.

It would seem somewhat unlikely to have businesses focus away from seeing risk in financial terms though.