Why Women Investors Outperform Men and What Wall Street Still Doesn’t See
Decades of data reveal women earn higher returns and fund stronger startups, yet women’s health remains one of the most underpriced asset classes in capital markets.
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In October 1987, when the Dow Jones plunged 22% in a single day, the New York Stock Exchange suspended trading to stop the bleeding. Traders described the floor as a war zone: ashtrays overturned, phones slammed down, men screaming into their jackets.
Almost no women were there. One of the few, a junior analyst named Diane, later recalled that when she urged her team to hold positions rather than panic-sell, her advice was dismissed outright. “Too cautious,” one colleague muttered, before unloading millions at the bottom.
History remembers Black Monday as a story of male bravado and systemic failure. What it rarely notes is that Diane, and women like her were sidelined just as the instincts that could have softened the blow were ignored.
Decades later, when the data began to trickle in, the irony was impossible to miss.
Women, excluded from the noise, had turned out to be better investors than the men who had owned the stage.
Not sometimes. Consistently.
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The Paradox of Doubt
I have spent over two decades in the world of finance advising billionaires, founders, and multi-generational families. And here’s the paradox I kept running into: the women at the table rarely believed they were the better investors.
“I’m not good with money,” one heiress told me flatly.
Another confided, “I don’t trust myself.” A third admitted she left most of the decisions to her husband.
And yet, when we looked at the numbers, when we traced their actual portfolios, another truth emerged. The very instincts that made these women hesitate were the ones that drove outperformance.
They traded less. They stayed invested longer. They anchored decisions to goals and values rather than noise.
What looked like hesitation was, in fact, discipline in disguise.
The Evidence Wall Street Ignores
Wall Street has a way of burying inconvenient truths in the footnotes of research reports.
When Fidelity combed through eight million accounts, it discovered that women earned an extra forty basis points a year compared to men1. Forty basis points is hardly headline-grabbing. But stretched across two decades, that difference quietly compounds into tens of thousands of dollars in additional wealth.
Barclays found the same pattern: women were less likely to churn their portfolios, which meant they avoided the wealth-killing habit of overtrading2. Insight from Investopedia confirmed it: success wasn’t about timing the market; it was about staying in it. And women, on average, did3.
It wasn’t only in public markets. When Boston Consulting Group analyzed 350 startups, it found women-led companies generated more revenue per dollar raised than male-led ones4. For every dollar invested, women returned 78 cents. Men returned 31 cents. The capital markets shrugged.
The data is there, hiding in plain sight. And yet the story remains untold.
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Wealth as More Than Money
The patterns I saw went beyond spreadsheets.
One family I advised illustrated it perfectly. The patriarch, a tech founder, loved momentum trades. He would call in a frenzy after every headline: EVs, biotech, AI.
His wife, by contrast, asked a quieter question: “What do we want this capital to mean for our children in twenty years?”
The portfolios told the story. His rapid-fire bets often fizzled; her steadier allocations compounded with fewer drawdowns. Over time, her results outpaced his, and with far less stress.
For her, wealth was not simply money. It was continuity. A legacy. A way of anchoring decisions so that volatility didn’t force rash exits.
From Portfolios to Private Markets: Women’s Edge in Women’s Health
The same instincts that help women outperform in public markets carry into private ones.
Early-stage investing demands patience, conviction, and discipline in the face of volatility. It rewards those who can identify inefficiencies before the market does. That is precisely where women excel. Not because they avoid risk, but because they frame it with intention. Nowhere is this advantage clearer than in women’s health innovation.
Despite representing half the addressable market, women’s health receives a fraction of available capital: less than 5% of digital health venture funding, and under 2% of biopharma R&D. This is not rational allocation. It is a structural blind spot.
And blind spots create opportunity.
We have seen this movie before. In the 1990s, oncology was a “niche” backwater. Funding was thin, pipelines anemic. Then came the re-rating: targeted therapies, immuno-oncology, blockbuster drugs that reshaped the entire biopharma landscape. Investors who recognized the inefficiency early captured extraordinary returns.
GLP-1s, today’s weight-loss blockbusters followed a similar arc. For years, they were overlooked as marginal diabetes drugs. It wasn’t until capital caught up with science that their true potential was re-priced, unleashing hundreds of billions in market cap.
Women’s health is standing at the same inflection point. The science is advancing. The demand is undeniable. Capital just hasn’t caught up. Yet.
For women investors, the informational advantage is profound. They understand signals male-dominated capital often dismisses. They see endometriosis, menopause, fertility, or contraception not as niche, but as trillion-dollar demand drivers of longevity and productivity. In private markets, that is edge. And edge compounds into return.
Let’s be clear. This is not about philanthropy or sentiment. It is about capital efficiency; allocating into an underpriced sector with scarcity, strong fundamentals, and asymmetric upside.
The Systemic Blind Spot
Even with the data in plain view, women remain underestimated in capital markets.
Female founders still raise less than half the funding of their male peers even though they generate higher ROI. Female investors are still labeled “too cautious” or “not confident enough” even as their portfolios quietly outperform.
It’s a mispricing hiding in plain sight. And the narrative can be rewritten.
This isn’t simply about women doing better with money. It’s about what happens when overlooked capital meets overlooked markets.
Women investors bring a measurable edge. Women’s health is an underpriced asset. Together, they aren’t just correcting a blind spot. They are creating the next growth frontier.
And like all quiet advantages in finance, it won’t stay quiet forever. The silent outperformance is already here. The only question is who will notice it first.
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This essay is part of my ongoing series on the billion-dollar blind spot in women’s health, wealth, and capital. You can subscribe to receive new essays every Sunday and join the conversation shaping the future of investing.
To go deeper, pre-order my upcoming book The Billion Dollar Blind Spot to learn why women’s health is the future of healthcare investing.
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Disclaimer & Disclosure
This content is for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, investment, legal, or medical advice, or an offer to buy or sell any securities. Opinions expressed are those of the author and may not reflect the views of affiliated organisations. Readers should seek professional advice tailored to their individual circumstances before making investment decisions. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
References
https://www.fidelity.com/bin-public/060_www_fidelity_com/documents/about-fidelity/FidelityInvestmentsWomen%26InvestingStudy2021.pdf
https://www.barclays.co.uk/smart-investor/news-and-research/gender-gap-in-investments
https://www.investopedia.com/why-you-should-invest-like-women-11757698
https://web-assets.bcg.com/img-src/BCG-Why-Women-Owned-Startups-Are-a-Better-Bet-May-2018-NL_tcm9-193585.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Totally loving these invaluable insights and value your hard work invested in research and delivering such high-quality content! Keep going!
I love this article Maryann! Imagine where we'd be if women's health and needs were taken seriously and funded at even a fraction of the rate that men's health is!? Menopause, brain fog, heavy periods, pregnancy outcomes, depression, heart disease, etc- so much potential that we don't use as a society. Yet, women grow and become strong precisely because we have to exercise our creative strength all the time to try to stay even.
In the US we are still so far behind Iceland where women figured out how to go on strike in 1975 in order to show their society how it doesn't function without them and how ridiculous it is for women to receive less pay for doing the exact same job (pay should be job dependent with a performance dependent range, not based on the characteristics of the person doing the job).
I bring up Iceland because men there seem very well aware of the statistics of how women outperform men in the finance market - both financially and ethically. After the sub-prime lending crash, more women (who had warned of the dangers and risk) ended up taking over in Iceland as their country learned from the incident and worked to ensure it would never happen again (they actually prosecuted the individuals who were knowingly responsible unlike in the US where we threw more tax-payer money at the problem and bailed them out). Three women stepped in to take over the three largest banks in Iceland after that event and Jóhanna Sigurðardótti became their first female Prime Minister who created a cabinet that was half women. I'm always pleased and surprised to hear Icelandic men articulate so well the reasons why they voted women into positions. It would be nice to not be surprised, but that's a result of my US-based upbringing...
I hope the US can learn from the successful models of other countries instead of having to be brought to financial ruin like Iceland in order to pivot. What's the saying in addiction recovery programs? You have to hit rock bottom in order to reach a turning point?