This past week, I hosted a table in Nairobi.
A small group of accomplished women. CEOs, founders, senior executives. No stage. No audience. No panel. Just a deliberately curated room and an unspoken agreement that we were going to talk about money the way women do more privately and openly than in public.
I want to let you overhear some of it. Not the confidences, which stay in the room. But the substance, because the substance is what women are not getting from the inspirational conversations that dominate every stage. What follows is not theory. It is what was actually said.
“Women Are Not Risk-Averse. We Are Risk Aware.”
One of the women said something that reframed a tired narrative in a single sentence. We have all heard, endlessly, that women are risk-averse. It has become a song. It is also wrong, or at least lazily incomplete. Women are not risk-averse. We are risk-aware. And risk awareness, properly applied, is not a weakness to be corrected. It is an advantage to be deployed.
