The ViewHedge fund management still a man’s world even though women outperform

Are women better fund managers than men? If a recent report on their performance as hedge fund managers is anything to go by, the answer is yes, but, as ever, it is complicated.

The HFRX Women index showed that in the first seven months of this year female hedge fund managers delivered average returns of around 10 per cent, roughly double that of their male counterparts. This does not seem to be a flash in the pan because the HFRX index shows a pattern of outperformance by female managers over a longer period.

These findings are not surprising; indeed I wonder why the differences are not more profound because the fund management industry is so overwhelmingly male dominated, to the extent that only rather exceptional women manage to rise to the top.

It is hard to get precise figures for the number of women employed as fund managers, however some research by professors Boyson and Aggarwal, published in 2015, found that no more than one in 20 hedge fund managers were women and pointed out that in the US just 184 out of 7,000 mutual funds are run by women.

You could cast the net wider in the finance industry because female stockbrokers are a relative rarity and whole swathes of the industry have retained an extraordinarily high level of male domination.

It is interesting to note in parenthesis that Hong Kong, so far behind the rest of the world on many social issues, has long had a rather formidable band of female stockbrokers who were active in the market at a time when sightings of women in other stock exchanges inevitably meant you were looking at secretaries. Maybe this has something to do with traditional Chinese thinking that has long held that women are more adroit money managers than men.