Not to be a stickler, but 9 is 1.5-times 5.82, not really double. It is still impressive, though, given how primitive their crayon drawings of houses and people are!

Also, the "hard-wired to be bigger risk takers" thing? It's bollocks. Full stop. There are studies, and they don't say what those writers seem to think they would.

Interesting. I'm going to go ahead and be a stickler and actually calculate what this would do to your principle... Over 9 years, if you invested the same amounts of money with 'average male hedge fund manager' and 'average female hedge fund manager', using their numbers, the ratio of those two sums would be (1.09/1.058)^9=1.3, so you would have 30% more in your account with 'average female', and after about a quarter century you'd have double.
Assuming what they say is true, that men take more risks as hedge fund managers, then the financial crisis is probably the elephant in the room here.

I agree. (This is why I'm not a hedge fund manager - besides a dislike for yachting - but it looks to me like if you start with $1000 and the man gives you 5.8% from 2000 to 2008 and loses you 19% in 2008, while the woman gives you 9% till 2008 and then loses you 9.6%, then you'd end up with $1,272 with the man, and $1,801 with the woman. So that's 29% less total gain with the man, or 42% more total gain with the woman, you could say.) Anyways, genetics aside, maybe the question is whether there is a difference in the kind of firms that hire female versus male hedge fund managers?

I don't know if anyone had noticed, but the New York Times does something similar to this. Every time there is a serious article discussing sexism in the film industry or highlighting the achievements of female filmmakers & screenwriters, or even an article discussing domestic violence and abuse, the NYT would file them under "Style/Fashion," which is just completely offensive and absurd.

Definitely a compelling thought, and it wouldn't surprise me at all that there might be significant differences in men's and women's investment portfolios.

But, it's _way_ premature to be drawing the conclusion that women outperform men based on a single business cycle, and the timing of the study period is a major issue here. Risk and volatility are two different things. To the extent that men might take on more risk, we should generally expect their returns to be higher in the long run by the weak form of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Short term volatility shouldn't have any long term impact, but in a study of this length differences in volatility could totally skew the results.

What would be more immediately informative would be information about how often they traded, what types of stocks they held, and what their fee structures looked like over the period. It could, for example, be the case that men take bigger risks, but any increase in returns they achieve are offset by higher fees associated with the way they trade. This would be in line with existing academic literature about the performance of index funds, etc.

I wonder what the sample sizes were. How many female hedge fund managers were they comparing to how many male?

I hate hate hate the term 'working mother'. My husband goes to work and he is a father, but he is not a 'working father'. We are not 'working parents' because I am not in paid employment. I had a reply letter from a government minister recently in which he told me that I don't work at all.

Obviously, I spend my days reading gossip magazines while my son watches cartoons.

I also hate hate hate the term 'stay at home mum'. We aren't actually home that often. I am educated, intelligent, and I desire to spend my day with my three-year-old than not with him. I prefer to say that I look after my son full-time.

Another possibility is that at that line of work, stereotypically an "old boy" kind of industry, a woman only gets promoted if she is not as good as the men working with her, but significantly better.

I'd have to agree with Persephone. The article states that only 6% of hedge fund managers are women. In such a male dominated field, I would think that those women who have reached that position would have to be far better at their job than the average male hedge fund manager.

It also points to the invisibility of men as working parents.

Hi, very good web site. Thank you.