Monday, December 10, 2012

Risk management by gender?


I'd never thought in terms of a gender attitude/bias/approach to risk management until I read this posting "How men and women manage risk differently" which is an interview with Angela Minzoni Alessio, an industrial and business anthropologist from the Ecole Centrale in Paris




Apparently, there is this to know:

  1. The evolution and taking into account qualitative policies and evaluation instead of only or predominantly quantitative policies. In other words, being open to risk management from a wider perspective.
  2. The focus on end-to-end prevention and care systems from design to implementation and evaluation. We should be looking at risk management from start to finish.
  3. An increasing capacity and focus on training to explicitly deal with subjects like morale, taboo, anger, hope or fear. Project management training should include all these when it comes to dealing with risk.

Today’s mainly masculine way to deal with risk and danger remains attached to objectivity and purity, with the risk analysis profession favouring the paradigm of rational choices, thinking probabilistically and using universalising terminology.

... we observe women will tend to be less impulsive and more willing to listen and explicitly acknowledge feelings such as danger and fear. This same attitude is also favourable to the disclosing of errors, an essential step in risk management.