Finance and Investments

It’s long been known that women make better investors than men, although frankly that’s not a particularly difficult thing to do as most males have the patience of a small child with a full bladder and a tendency to hair-trigger trading for all sorts of behaviourally induced reasons. However, what’s a bit more surprising is that this difference is seen in professional investment circles as well while at the same time biases against female fund managers ensure they have less money to manage more wisely.

Female investment managers are more risk-adverse than their male colleagues and tend to stick closer to benchmarks and their own investment styles. Although they also find there are no significant differences in investment returns between the sexes they also note that women achieve greater performance persistence – which is another way of saying that they don’t tend to be amongst the outliers of great success or great failure.

Given that there are essentially no differences in returns between male and female managers you’d assume that there’d be no difference in the relative amount of funds under management but, of course, you’d be wrong as the researchers find that women only attract half the funds that men do. Which leads them to pose the provocative but interesting question: this being the case, why do fund managers bother employing women at all?

In my experience investment industry is rife with gender bias – although it’s no different from most industries in this regard – and it rather looks like our innate stereotyping mechanisms are behind this. We regard money management as a male preserve and regard successful women as odd and dangerous creatures to be avoided. In reality if we want our money managed conservatively with the minimum of fuss and risk we should seek out female fund managers. On the other hand, if we like to see our net worth changing rapidly then a red-blooded male’s the best choice: just don’t bet on the direction of net worth change being in a positive direction.

From the Psy-Fi Blog