Fidelity International recently went through three years of its own customer data and found something the investment industry might prefer not to dwell on: female investors generated cumulative returns of 50%, compared with 47% for men.
Then there is Barclays, which provides a clue as to why the first number may exist at all: women trade roughly half as often as men.
Taken together, the findings show the people getting the better result are also the people least likely to enter the market in the first place.
A small gap with a good headline
Start with the 3% return difference, because it’s the number most likely to get attention.
£20,000 growing by 50% over three years becomes £30,000. At 47%, it becomes £29,400. That is £600 – roughly 14.5% a year annualised versus 13.7%.
Real money, certainly. But not a revolution.
The figures cover one firm's customers over one three-year period. Markets behave differently from one cycle to the next, and so do investors. I wouldn’t build an investment strategy around a result like this, and nor should anyone else.
What interests me more is what sits behind it.
The virtue of doing less
Men, according to the research, trade more. Women trade less. That sounds almost too neat, but there’s a useful lesson in it.
Joanna Floyd, the business psychologist interviewed by the BBC in this article, argued that men tend to trade more in pursuit of higher returns and can end up achieving lower ones for the effort. Women, by trading about half as often, appear to benefit from leaving things alone.
There’s a pleasing irony here. An industry built around activity keeps producing evidence that inactivity can be a competitive advantage.
Every trade is another decision and every decision is another opportunity to chase last year's winner, panic at the wrong moment, time the market badly or simply incur another cost.
None of this means that trading is inherently foolish. Sometimes portfolios need tweaking, circumstances change and an investment should be sold.
But there’s a big difference between making necessary decisions and constantly feeling the need to do something. Investing is one of the few areas of life where effort and outcome are not reliably correlated.
Put simply, more buttons pressed does not necessarily mean more money made.
The bigger gap isn’t performance
The more important number, in my view, is 26% versus 41%. Fifteen percentage points more men than women hold investments at all.
That matters far more than a 3% performance gap over three years because participation compounds over decades.
Money left in cash instead of invested for 20 or 30 years doesn’t merely miss a few percentage points of return, but the possibility of an entire working lifetime of market growth and compounding.
Of course, not all cash should be invested. Emergency savings belong somewhere safe and accessible and money needed soon shouldn’t be exposed to unnecessary market risk.
However, there’s a substantial difference between holding cash for a reason and holding it because investing feels unfamiliar or intimidating. The latter can become an expensive form of caution.
Risk averse or merely risk aware?
Some of the investment gap is straightforwardly economic. Women still tend to earn less over the course of their careers, which means there often is less surplus income available to invest in the first place.
But money is only part of the explanation. Professor Gillian Fleming of Mint Ventures argues that the participation gap is also cultural. Men have historically made more of the investment decisions within households and controlled a greater share of family wealth. That was the case for my parents – my mum, a teacher, left the decisions to my father (he did work in financial services so that maybe was the “obvious” thing to do).
I particularly like Fleming's distinction between being risk averse and being risk aware. The first suggests timidity. The second suggests judgement.
And on the evidence here, "risk aware" may be the more useful description.
If caution leads someone to avoid fashionable punts, excessive trading and products they do not understand, it’s difficult to call that a flaw. The problem arises when caution stops them investing altogether.
That’s the paradox: too much caution at the beginning can be costly, while a healthy amount of caution once invested may be exactly what helps.
An industry that sells motion
This is where I think the investment industry gets itself into trouble.
When someone feels uncertain about investing, the industry's instinct is often to give them more: more choice, more commentary, more trading tools, more alerts, more products, more reasons to log in.
A nervous investor is presented with an impressive dashboard full of things to worry about.
What may feel like sophistication often is just noise.
There’s also an awkward commercial reality in that activity can be profitable for financial firms. Trading generates dealing fees, product switching creates opportunities to sell something new and, ultimately, complexity makes it harder to understand exactly what you’re paying for.
Patience, by contrast, is a difficult thing to monetise. A customer who buys a sensible diversified portfolio, leaves it alone and checks in occasionally is not terribly exciting. They may, however, be doing exactly the right thing.
The lesson hidden in the numbers
I wouldn’t read the Fidelity figures and conclude that women are inherently better investors than men.
But I do think the findings point to something more durable. Sound investing tends to reward a handful of fairly unglamorous behaviours: getting started, diversifying properly, keeping costs low, ignoring noise and resisting the urge to interfere.
The first of those is where women appear to be falling behind, while the last may be where they have an advantage.
This is also very close to the thinking behind Prosper, too. We built it for someone who wants sensible, diversified investments at a cost they can understand – and then wants to get on with the rest of their life.
Direct access to your own plan, fees visible in one place rather than buried in the small print, no placement commissions, no servicing-fee carve-outs for intermediaries. And nothing in our model that benefits because you trade more often than you need to.
I don’t think a good investment platform should make people feel as though they need to be constantly doing something. If patience is one of the behaviours that helps investors succeed, the platform should support it rather than find ways to monetise the alternative.
Oftentimes the best thing an investor can do is nothing at all.
Capital at risk. The value of investments can go down as well as up and you may get back less than you invest.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute personal financial advice. If you are unsure whether an investment is right for you, please seek regulated financial advice.
The Fidelity International figures relate to one firm's customer base over a single three-year period. A difference of this size over one period should not be taken as evidence that either women or men will outperform in future.
Sources:
BBC News, 11 August 2026, reporting analysis from Fidelity International: bbc.com/news/articles/czdmgmzll1ro
Barclays: https://www.barclays.co.uk/smart-investor/news-and-research/gender-gap-in-investments/