This morning, the Wall Street Journal reported on funds that choose to tie their fates to the performance of companies led by women. Barclays’ Women in Leadership Total Return Index, which consists of American companies with a female CEO or whose proportion of female board members is at least 25 percent, is one of number of new funds that aims to capitalize on the finding that companies with female leaders tend to outperform those where women are relatively absent. (Amusingly and depressingly, even if Barclays were based in the U.S., it wouldn’t qualify for its own fund, due to its lack of female leaders.)
The female-favoring trend the Journal identified stems from research suggesting that companies run by women simply do better. For example, a 2011 reportfrom Catalyst, a nonprofit promoting women in business, found that over the course of five years, companies with women on their boards had average returns on equity of 15.3 percent, while those of companies without any female board members were 10.5 percent. (Return on equity is a figure that gives a sense of a company’s ability to generate profit from shareholders’ investments.)
But the benefits of investing in female-led financial endeavors go even further than the Journal has it: Hedge funds run by women tend to outperform other hedge funds. A report put out in early 2013 by the accounting firm Rothstein Kass indicated that between January 2012 and September 2012, an index of 67 hedge funds owned or managed by women had a return of 8.95 percent—significantly more than the 2.69 percent return generated by an index “designed to be representative of the overall composition of the hedge fund universe.” (The 67 funds were chosen because they reported their monthly performance to HedgeFund.net or the Hedge Fund Research Database.) The impacts of these outsized gains, however, largely remain to be felt, as there are only about 125 female-run hedge funds in the world, according to Reuters.
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