In some aspects of organizational life, women have been shown to be more risk adverse than men (e.g., acquisitions, cross-listings, personal career dimensions). Individuals, however, are composed of multiple identities, each with varying levels of strength of identification and contextual salience. We meld insights from identity theory into the debate around gender risk aversion to identify conditions under which women may be more open to risk. Our focus is on women directors and financial risk-taking decisions made by the board. Rather than assuming gender risk-taking propensity is always fixed, we ask: When are women on boards of directors open to financial risk-taking? We build theoretical insights about women directors’ identities to explore the relationships between identity with being a director (independence vs. dependence), identity with the organization (owner vs. outsider), identity salience (finance committee membership) and financial risk-taking behavior in the form of the firm’s foreign investment portfolio. We test our hypotheses using 1,308 observations from 2010-2020 from 141 Indian firms. Our findings indicate that more nuanced consideration of women director’s identities in corporate governance is warranted to understand their risk-taking behavior and represent early empirical insight into the role of directors’ identification.