Women-led Mutual Funds Besting Male Funds: Report

Female-managed mutual funds have outperformed male funds this year, thanks to greater holdings in hot technology stocks, Goldman Sachs said Monday.

"In the centenary of women's suffrage, mutual funds with female portfolio managers are beating their male counterparts," Goldman said in a report.

"Even after adjusting for risk, female-managed funds have outperformed their counterparts amid pandemic-related market swings."

In a volatile year, 43 percent of female-managed funds have outperformed the market compared with just 41 percent of funds with no female managers, the report said. The two groups produced roughly equivalent results from 2017 through 2019.

The report compared female-managed firms, which account for only about 13 percent of all large capitalization US mutual funds, against all-male firms, which comprise more than three-quarters of all funds

In addition to better results, female-managed funds "withstood many of the market swings" that affected other funds in the early part of the year before the severe stock market pullback in March due to the coronavirus pandemic, the report said.

Goldman attributed the success of the women-managed funds to larger holdings in information technology stocks, especially software, hardware and semiconductor stocks, companies that have boomed with the surge in working from home.

At the same time, the female-managed funds invested relatively smaller sums in financial stocks, which have underperformed the broader market in 2020.