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Women, including women CEOs, are often considered to be uniformly more risk averse than men. The upper echelon research has found support for this ubiquitous assumption, although recent literature has begun to find that women, compared to men, may take more risk in leading firms. We argue that these findings may be affected by the fact that women are not all the same; they have historically faced glass-ceiling challenges in reaching the upper echelon, and once they do, they may be confronted with different types of challenges than men. We take a nuanced approach and consider how individual and situational factors affect women CEOs' strategic risk-taking. In doing so, we aim to develop the concept of gender-based experiential risk aversion. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 802 CEO appointments to the S&P 1500 and a proprietary dataset that includes the pre-appointment career trajectories of CEOs. Our results challenge universal assumptions of women CEOs' risk aversion by indicating that female CEOs are more likely to choose risky strategies when they are younger, have less years of executive experience, and are appointed to less stable firms. Our findings contribute to the literature on upper echelons, strategic risk-taking and experiential learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the likelihood of turnover if an organization has not been learning from failures? Which firm strategies and actions moderate turnover following an adverse corporate event? Prior research has focused on the antecedents of failure learning while overlooking these questions. Using a dataset of product recalls as a setting for organizational learning, I document that the likelihood of turnover substantially increases for the executives of firms that have recent recalls relative to the executives of the propensity-score matched, nonrecall control firms. Furthermore, executives become more likely to exit if the recalls are reputational shocks; less likely to exit if a firm responds to consumer complaints proactively, and is strong in CSR. The results contribute to our understanding of the managerial consequences of failure learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]