Women underestimating their success as investors
NEW YORK — Ma ny me n a n d women think men are the better investors. They’re wrong.
After checking how 8 million of its customers did during 2016, Fidelity Investments found that women did better than men by an average of 0.4 percentage points.
The difffffffffffference in performance is small, and it’s always dangerous to make big generalizations out of small slices of data. But it slots in with other research that suggests women tend to take a longer-term view of investing. They are more likely to buy and hold their investments, and they take fewer risks, for example.
Researchers are generally loathe to declare one gender as absolutely better than the other in investing, and other studies have shown men doing slightly better than women over other periods of time, but the fifigures underscore that women at least shouldn’t be too pessimistic about their own abilities. That would be a dangerous thing if it discourages them from investing for retirement or other goals.
“When women actually take the step of investing, they do a good job,” says Kathleen Murphy, president of personal investing at Fidelity. “It doesn’t surprise us, but I think it will surprise them. The issue is: How do we get women to have the confifidence in themselves to take care of something that is fundamental to their future well-being?”
To check confidence levels, Fidelit y asked pollsters to survey about 1,000 investors early this year and ask whether they thought men or women had the better returns in 2016.
Men a n d women a n s were d roughly the same way. Nearly half of each group thought there would be no difffffffffffference (49 percent of men and 47 percent of women). But among those who guessed that one gender would come out on top, the vast majority said it would be men. Only 9 percent of women (and 9 percent of men) said they thought women earned higher returns in 2016.
One of the main reasons for the lack of confifidence among women may be the fifinancial services industry itself. It’s one that was created by and, for a long time, run for men. So much so that Sallie Krawcheck, a Wall Street veteran who earlier ran Merrill Lynch and Smith Barney, cited that when she co-founded Ellevest , an online investment adviser that says it helps customers “invest like a woman.”
The disparities run up and down Wall Street. Less than 10 percent of all U.S. fund managers are women, and the percentage has been on a slow decline since 2008, according to a recent study by Morningstar. Managers attribute much of that to the small percentage of women throughout the fifinancial industry. When relatively few analysts are women, that leaves few potential fund managers.
Financial firms certainly have an incentive to engage more with women. Divorce rates are rising for older Americans, which means more women are becoming a sole fifinancial decision maker. And women continue to have longer life expectancies than men. In blunt market terms, that makes them a bigger pool of potential customers.
Fidelity says it has already seen improvements in recent years following its increased outreach to female customers, with more getting their portfolios in better balance. But there’s still more room for improvement.