MARCH 8th International Women’s Day always brings a flood of reports about gender inequalities in from health results to pay and advertising. But one gap is steadily narrowing: that in wealth. As money managers seek to appeal to and serve wealthy women, so that as those women express their ideals through their portfolios, the impact will be felt within the investment industry and beyond. 72trn, 32% of the full total. And the majority of the private wealth that changes hands in the coming decades will probably go to women.

Upgrade your inbox and get our day to day Dispatch and Editor’s Picks. One reason for women’s growing prosperity is that far more of these are in well-paid work than before. All this will have big implications for asset managers. Take a risk-profiling. Surveys show that men’s behavior to risk are typically more gung-ho, whereas women will buy and hold, that leading advisers to conclude that men are less risk-averse. And men are more likely to say that they understand financial concepts, which might appear to suggest that they are more financially literate.

But it may be more accurate to say that women are more risk-aware and less deluded about their financial competence. A study in 2001 by Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, academics in the field of behavioral finance, showed that women outperformed men on the market by one percentage point a yr. The primary reason, they argued, was that men were much more likely to be overconfident than women, … Read the rest