The quick answer, which may surprise you, is yes.

It was a lot of fun researching this blog topic. Oh, you may say I'm biased. You don't right away believe me. Actually, the word about women's superior investing has been published in economics journals since 2001, but C-Span hasn't exactly done a miniseries on the topic, if you know what I mean. Even a cursory level of research on the subject makes one wonder why investors still let men manage the vast majority of their wealth.
Let me back up.

This topic has been in the back of my mind for a couple weeks now, inspired both by readers comments and by some of the back and forth going on between the editors on much (literally) sexier subject matter. I got the idea to look into this subject when I read Ilene and Grace's dialogue about women's sexual proclivity. The question there amounted to: Are women hardwired to be more relationship-oriented than men, with fewer sex partners and less sex for sheer animal recreation? Grace cleverly adjusted the terms of the question in her response, destabilizing distinctions between, say, recreation and romance.

These questions about gender and hardwiring are famously tricky. The former President of Harvard, Larry Summers, made a speech in 2005 that explained the underrepresentation of women faculty in math and science as a function of "different availability of aptitude at the high end." He got fired by the faculty in 2006.

So, all that is to say, I won't argue that women are hardwired to be better investors than men. I was one of those Harvard alumni firing off angry e-mails during the board's deliberations about Larry Summers. The problem with hardwired hypotheses is there's no control group. How will we know what women are capable of until we try?

The best research on the subject of women's performance in investing isn't even about gender — it's about confidence. Two members of the Berkeley faculty, Brad Barber and Terrance Odean, combed through data from Wall Street in the 1990s to test a theory about the role of overconfidence in financial markets. "Theoretical models of financial markets built on the assumption that some investors are overconfident yield one central prediction: overconfident investors will trade too much. We test this prediction by partitioning investors on the basis of a variable that provides a natural proxy for overconfidence — gender." Their paper, published in 2001, found that women investors earn significantly higher returns than men investors. Women who don't live with men earn even more — a 2.3% greater return on investments.

They found that women do better at investing for a number of reasons. The main reason is that women research more and trade less.

Fortunately, some other folks are following up on this line of inquiry. A blogger and editor for value-investor site Motley Fool recently compiled this list of women's investing advantages.

* Women spend more time researching their investment choices than men do. This prevents them from chasing "hot" tips and trading on whims — behavior that tends to weaken men's portfolios.
* Men trade 45% more often than women do, and although men are more confident investors, they tend to be overconfident. By trading more often — and without enough research — men reduce their net returns. But by trading less often, women get better returns and also save on transaction costs and capital gains taxes.
* A study by the University of California at Davis found that women's portfolios gained 1.4% more than men's portfolios did. What's more, single women did even better than single men, with 2.3% greater gains.
* Women tend to look at more than just numbers when deciding whether to invest in a company. They invest in companies they feel good about ethically and personally. And companies with good products, good services and ethics tend to have better long-term prospects — and face fewer lawsuits.

The list is mostly culled from Brad Barber and Terrance Odean's work that I cited above.

In case you think maybe the 1990s were a fluke, there's evidence that women were investing better than men as far back as 1720. There was a famous stock market crash after the run up of the 17teens, much like the dotcom and NASDAQ bubble, but centered around merchant shipping companies. The South Sea Company could be considered the Pets.com of its time. The term asset "bubble" comes from this era, as companies added the word sea to anything.

 

Women didn't lose their shirts (or bras) in that stock market, either. According to economists Ann Carlos and Larry Neal, while stock in many sea companies went up from a hundred pounds a share to thousands of pounds a share and then quickly crashed to nothing, women still managed to generate positive returns. "While individual women lost and made money from their market activity, women's net positions over the bubble was positive. We also provide a case study of Johanna Cock, one of the larger broker jobbers in bank stock. By September 1720, women made up 20% of bank shareholders holding 10% of the capital stock. By September 1725, women held nearly 15% of a much larger capital stock."

My hunch is there are a lot of women reading OurChart who don't live romantically with a man. That means you have a 2.3% advantage on the returns that your average male investor will generate. Do you know how many fund managers would kill for a 2.3% spread right now? Believe in yourself. Or maybe, since the best research on the subject is all about confidence, I should say: believe in your own intelligent doubt.