on’t go out alone in the dark. Don’t get carried away in the heat of the moment. Work twice as hard in order to be taken half as seriously, but don’t work so hard that you somehow forget to have a baby. Be nice, be good, but above all be careful.
To grow up as a girl is so often to grow up being told that the world is a perilous place full of chances to get it horribly wrong, where if something bad happens it will probably be your fault somehow.
Women are positively encouraged to question and doubt themselves, to check and double-check before venturing an opinion in case someone thinks it’s stupid; to play it safe if in doubt. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that research shows women are more likely than men to anticipate a bad outcome from taking a risk, and therefore less likely to take risks in the first place.
Like all gendered generalisations, it’s never going to be true of everyone. But on average men are more likely to gamble for money, to jump an amber traffic light, and to die in accidents; women are more likely to use sunscreen, wear seatbelts and to say they’d wear a face mask in public. For, just as polling has long shown they were more worried about the downsides of Brexit, it’s women who seem to be most risk-averse about coronavirus.
They may be less likely to die of it, but surveys show women seem more frightened of the virus, sticking more closely than men to the rules on social distancing, and worrying more about the risks of sending children back to school. That fits with research that has long suggested women become more cautious in stressful situations, while men if anything tend to take more risks under pressure.
It’s hard to say how much of that’s down to testosterone and how much to a lifetime of social conditioning. But for whatever reason, women seem less prone to breezily assuming they’re invulnerable, or to reckoning they can wing it. It may not be entirely a coincidence that several female-led countries, from New Zealand to Taiwan, have coped disproportionately well with the coronavirus pandemic.
Which brings us to the Labour MP Rosie Duffield’s observation, at Wednesday’s prime minister’s questions, that there are only a handful of women on the government’s scientific advisory group, Sage, and there are remarkably few women within government influencing decisions on coronavirus. While Boris Johnson was quick to protest that he had hired the businesswoman Dido Harding and the biotech investor Kate Bingham to oversee the delivery of coronavirus testing and any future vaccine respectively, all four of the ministerial “quad” calling the shots are men, and it’s starting to look as if that matters.
You might well wonder whether an all-female quad would have announced on a Sunday that people should go back to work on Monday without having a watertight answer to the question: “But what if they don’t have any childcare?” The problem, however, goes rather deeper than that.
It will ultimately be for an inquiry to decide whether this government could have saved lives by locking down earlier, and if so what tangled web of factors stopped them doing so. But it’s clear that from the start Downing Street underestimated the public’s willingness to shield from the virus and now it seems equally wrong-footed by people’s anxiety about coming out again. The tin-eared handling of attempts to reopen schools suggests it still doesn’t understand why a lot of teachers and parents are frightened. (For what it’s worth, almost half the members of the alternative Sage committee – set up by the former chief scientific adviser David King as a parallel source of expertise – are female. Today it contradicted ministers by concluding that 1 June is too early to reopen classrooms.)
For all the excitable pre-Covid talk of bringing more mavericks into Whitehall to challenge the prevailing wisdom, this crisis could arguably have used a few more conformists – people willing to recognise that prevailing wisdom around the world was actually right this time.
If caution and conformity can sometimes be paralysing, overconfidence can sometimes be deadly, which is why good decision-making bodies look for a mix of the bold and the cautious: for lucky generals who are used to falling on their feet, but also for people who may have learned the hard way that there won’t always be a safety net to catch them – people who are harder to find at the top of public life.
The most risk-averse person in the room will by no means always be female but, statistically speaking, she’s more likely to be, and in the end that’s why diversity matters. It’s not about ticking boxes, still less about spurious window-dressing. It’s about knowing where, and sometimes who, your blind spots are.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist