Are Women Better at Managing Risk

You hear a lot about those studies in which women make less risky financial decisions and end up as better investors in many laboratory experiments. This ties in with the fact that women tend to be less risky on a range of characteristics--driving, health, etc.

It's easy to extrapolate from here and suggest that finance is a horrible male-dominated world, and that's the cause of all of our problems.

However, I ran into this study, which says:

We examine the performance and investment behavior of female fixed-income mutual fund managers compared with male fixed-income mutual fund managers. We find that male- and female-managed funds do not differ significantly in terms of performance, risk, and other fund characteristics. Our results suggest that differences in investment behavior often attributed to gender may be related to investment knowledge and wealth constraints.