US Edition Women are far more likely to share their investment decisions with their male partners, while men tend to keep their finances separate, research for the Investment Garden has shown.
Alliance Trust, which conducted in-depth interviews into how people manage their finances for this series, found that while women mention their partners and their shared investments when discussing financial plans and aspirations, men did not mention female partners at all in conjunction with money.
However, despite this male tendency, history has shown that women usually make better financial strategists due to their attitude to risk. Research by Professor Terrance Odean at the University of California, showed that over seven years, single female investors outperformed single men by 2.3 per cent; female investment groups outperformed male counterparts by 4.6 per cent; and women overall outperformed by 1.4 per cent.
Professor Odean puts this down to overconfidence in men, who then make poor trading decisions, where women are more likely to be risk averse and less confident in their abilities.
Women also said that financial service advertisements were aimed squarely at men, which put them off investment in some cases. “Financial services don’t come across as a sexy product, it’s not appealing. It doesn’t hold enough interest for me to want to invest after seeing an ad,” one respondent said.
Alliance Trust’s research found that female investors were more likely to be conservative investors. Of the respondents to its survey, 89 per cent of those who were described as "adventurous" investors were male, which dropped to 66 per cent for those described as conservative.
Conservative investors are interested in products such as peer-to-peer investment, shares and bonds, Alliance Trust found. Those who fitted the profile of a "balanced" investor – who wanted to balance risk and reward – were interested in Exchange Traded Funds and commodities. Adventurous investors said they wanted more information about wine, gold and silver.
The research showed that both men and women were more likely to become adventurous with investments as they got older, regardless of whether they had a conservative or balanced attitude towards finance.
A new way to look at personal finance, the Ecology of Investment series, produced by The Telegraph in partnership with Alliance Trust, will show how the complex global financial system, with interconnecting forces and needs, influences your investments.