By Gemma Boothroyd
for the 2025 Risky Women Writing Competition, presented in partnership with Ocorian
In a world where impulsive decision-making is championed, Elin Baklid-Kunz serves as a reminder that calculated risk can be a woman’s secret weapon. Naturally patient and focused on long-term outcomes, she took on the powerhouse of Halifax Health—and yet, somehow, whispers circulated that it must have been a man.
“The chance of getting money was almost zero.”
That’s how Elin Baklid-Kunz opened our conversation, taking a pre-emptive strike at anyone assuming she blew the whistle on her former employer, Halifax Health, for profit.
Integrity, not payout, drove her.
Yet she ultimately walked away with an $85 million settlement — a spectacularly rare outcome.
Most U.S. whistleblowers never get help from the Department of Justice (the government’s own prosecutors), and those who pursue a case alone almost never see a financial recovery. The stakes are enormous: nearly two-thirds of whistleblowers will lose their jobs or are forced to retire as retaliation.
Especially given research shows women who insist on doing the right thing often pay the highest price: isolation, stalled careers, and smear campaigns. Even in the world of GRC, where ethics should reign supreme, that cost can look a lot more like professional exile and a lot less like an eight-figure settlement.
As a journalist writing a book about gender and risk-taking, I see the same pattern time and again: when women risk reporting misconduct, they face harsher retribution than men.
Elin knows that truth all too well.
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After emigrating from Norway to Florida, Elin joined Halifax Health, which ran a group of American hospitals. She rose from a Financial Analyst to Compliance Revenue and Integrity before serving as the Director of Physician Services.
From that perch, she uncovered contracts from hospitals rewarding doctors for prescribing specific drugs and tests, and billing Medicare for unnecessary procedures too. This was a glaring violation of the Physician Self-Referral Law, which prohibits doctors from profiting off of referrals
Some treatments were performed at a staggeringly inappropriate rate — up to four times the national average.
When Elin realized what was happening, she raised her concerns with the team. Their reply? That her loyalty should be with Halifax, not the government.
So she did what any meticulous risk professional might do, and opened up Excel.
“I put everything in a spreadsheet—pros and cons,” she said. “My biggest fear was that if I didn’t do anything, someone else would speak up and I’d end up being sued myself. When you have kids, you can’t take the chance of going to jail.”
At that point, the decision had become a no-brainer. She proceeded to file her claim against Halifax.
This risk Elin took was deliberate, evidence-driven and morally anchored. And there’s reason to believe that these traits typically come more naturally to women than men.
A 2020 survey of nearly 350,000 people across 67 countries found women consistently scored higher in both fairness and care, two key elements of moral reasoning. The United Nations has even said that a critical step in reducing global corruption is to empower more women.
And yet, women are all too often dubbed the risk-averse gender.
What Elin did is a textbook case of advanced risk-management. She carefully assessed the long-term consequences of the decision at hand and gathered the necessary proof to make her case.
Whereas research suggests men are more impulsive decision-makers, women are more focused on long-term outcomes. Women are on average a bit more patient about the far future than men are. They’re more likely to take risks that will pay off later rather than grasping for quick wins.
Focusing on the big picture rather than the here-and-now is bound to open up space for more ethical decision-making.
As Elin put it, “Compliance is not necessarily about knowing all the laws, but relying on your values when faced with ethical dilemmas. If it doesn’t feel right, you should probably do more research and seek advice.”
She emphasizes that women should be well aware that they could face repercussions for doing so, though.
For one year and three months after reporting Halifax’s wrongdoing, nobody in the office knew she was the secret whistleblower. Whispers and musings speculated that it had to be a man.
Elin stayed quiet.
She kept showing up, day in and day out.
Once Halifax eventually found out she was responsible for spilling the truth, Elin says, “I was shunned at work. It was horrible. People would get fired if they spoke with me.”
She’s far from alone.
Frances Haugen at Meta, Timnit Gebru at Google, Rebecca Rivers and Janneke Parrish at Apple, Susan Fowler at Uber. Those are the names of women who exposed shocking misconduct at some of the world’s most powerful tech companies.
Each endured fierce backlash before their revelations forced public reckoning.
These stories, and countless others, prove that women aren’t just capable of courageous risk — they’re uniquely equipped to take it. Ignoring the risk intelligence women bring to the table isn’t just a missed opportunity, it’s an outright liability no company can afford.