On a recent ski tour a companion told me that contrary to conventional wisdom (or at least what I thought was conventional wisdom), mixed gender groups suffer from worse decisions than groups of all males. This was surprising to me, so I looked into the academic literature on gender and group decision making in avalanche terrain.

The source of the claim that mixed gender groups make worse decisions appears to be McCammon (2004a) (which is a shortened version of the two-part McCammon (2004b) and McCammon (2004c)). In fact, as far as I can tell, this article is the only empirical evidence that supports the claim. McCammon took data on avalanche accidents and computed exposure scores for each – the number of the following warning signs present: obvious avalanche path; recent loading; terrain trap; posted hazard considerable or greater; recent avalanches; thaw instability; and instability signs. The main result related to gender is,

Conditional on being in a accident, the average number of warning signs is higher for mixed gender than all male groups. This is suggestive of mixed gender groups making worse decisions, but it is not conclusive. An additional useful statistic would be the probability of an avalanche incident conditional on mixed gender and conditional on all male (and all female, but the relative rarity of female backcountry skiers makes data on all female groups prohibitively rare).

Sole et al. (2010) surveyed 457 MEC customers in Calgary and Vancouver who had traveled through avalanche terrain in the previous 12 months. They found that the probability of an avalanche incident for people with a women in their group <75% of the time was 2.63 times the probability of an avalanche incident for people with a women in their group ≥75% of the time. The article is gated, so here are the relevant numbers from Table 2.

Contrary to McCammon (2004a), these results suggest that groups with woman have lower avalanche risk than groups of all men.

I could not find any other articles with empirical evidence on the relationship between gender mix and avalanche incidents or decision making. Somewhat related and relevant to the BCMC is Sherman and Chatman (2013), which looks at the relationship between group diversity and accidents in Himalayan mountaineering. The article focuses on national diversity, but they also look at gender diversity. They find that groups with a higher percent of females have a lower probability of accidents.

There is a large literature in pyschology on group decision making and gender. A common finding is that groups with more females make better decisions. Woolley et al. (2010) is one prominent example. However, it is unclear whether the findings about group decisions made in laboratory settings studied by psychologists would apply to the types of group decisions made by backcountry skiers.

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Very interesting article... thank you for posting.  I especially like this conclusion from one study... "They find that groups with a higher percent of females have a lower probability of accidents."

Thanks for the interesting read Paul S! I recall talking about this the other week.

This is really problematic for me for a number of reasons. First, it says absolutely nothing about the decision-making role of the women in the group. The implication is that our (women's) decision making contributions are endangering the group, when in reality, we are rarely afforded the same opportunity to contribute to decision making as men, even if we are more experienced than the men in the group. Often this is simply a function of speed; statistically we are unlikely to be as fast as most men and, in practice, route finding decisions are typically made by whoever is breaking trail (the strongest/fastest, not necessarily the most experienced). I can't even count the number of times I've looked at a sketchy uptrack and had to decide whether to follow it (because it's there) or to expend the extra energy to break a new track along an obviously safer line. It's not always an easy call when you're already expending more energy trying to keep up with the boys. Not to mention the power dynamics involved when we dare to question an alpha male's decision. We typically have to pick our battles wisely and that often means staying silent when we see sketchy things happening.

So, if men are making most decisions in both all-male and mixed groups, what accounts for the difference? Well, one obvious example jumps to mind: straight dudes take stupid risks to show off for women. I'm sure there's some research to back that up (not to mention almost every woman's personal experience).

And then there's this line: "but the relative rarity of female backcountry skiers makes data on all female groups prohibitively rare." What a cop-out! Sure, there's not as many of us as there are dudes, but we're here. And we're really not all that rare if you just stop ignoring us. Maybe it'd be a smaller sample size, but the data is already so skewed by excluding us entirely that it just becomes meaningless. You simply can't compare gendered decision making if you exclude all-women groups from your study.

As the latter portion of the post suggests, women's decision-making generally does not lead to increased risk. If this is to be proven untrue in avalanche terrain then women's experiences actually have to be studied too and not just men's. Anything less is just noise.

Bird, I'm a statistician of sorts, and I tried to just summarize the statistics without speculating about the mechanism. Your reaction to the idea that mixed gender groups make worse decisions is completely spot on. McCammon's explanation for his results is exactly that "straight dudes take stupid risks to show off for women." He describes it less eloquently and more verbosely, "One of the more familiar forms of this heuristic is gender acceptance, or engaging in activities that we believe will get us accepted (or at least noticed) by the opposite sex. For men, this heuristic often manifests itself in certain types of risk-taking behavior, particularly during adolescent and early adult years. Various studies have established that under certain circumstances, men in the presence of female peers will behave more competitively, aggressively, or engage in riskier behaviors." 

About the lack of information on all female groups --- I agree that it sucks. I didn't write any of these papers, and I don't research avalanches. I read these papers (and about a dozen others that weren't as relevant), and could find nothing about all female groups. I wrote most of my post, and then thought it was sounded strange that it said nothing about all female groups.  I threw in that sentence about lack of data as an explanation. I think it's true, but I was speculating.

I left my opinion out of my post intentionally, but if I had to take a side, I think the evidence points to mixed gender groups making less risky decisions than all male groups. However, there is not much relevant avalanche data, and a large amount of uncertainty remains.

The study was done about ten years ago now. I believe that the observations and remarks made in the study were very good. Two differences today are, the increase in the number of females participating and the overall level of acceptance of good avalanche training. It is time to do another study. Apples compared to oranges kinda think. I doubt the group decisions have improved.

An avalanche in Stevens Pass about this time in 2012 created a bit of a stir because of the high level of experience and the inferred expertise of the people involved. Of course it was a mixed group.