Male advisors may fail their female clients without even realizing it.
For women, working with male advisors can lead to a lower tolerance for risk, a higher allocation to cash and, in the long run, lower returns, according to a U.K. study published in May.
In fact, under the right conditions, women may be more comfortable with taking investing risks than men, according to “Financial Advice, Wealth and Gender: Risk Tolerance, Knowledge and Confidence."
Though, on average, women tend to allocate five percentage points more to cash in their portfolios than men, Ylva Baeckstrom of King’s College London and Ian Marsh and Jo Silvester of City University London found in an online study of 500 investors that gender differences in risk tolerance and investing confidence go deeper than trends in asset allocation and are impacted by issues like the presence—and the gender—of a financial advisor.
All of the investors in the study, regardless of gender or sex, allocated fewer assets to cash when working with a financial advisor than they did when self-managing their investments. Among the participants, those working with an advisor had a cash allocation almost 15 percentage points lower than those with no professional financial advice. However, when female investors worked with male advisors, two-thirds of this affect was offset.
On the other hand, when women in the study worked with woman advisors, they on average held less cash and considered themselves to be more risk tolerant than men.
“Gender on its own is not sufficiant to characterise the risk tolerance attitudes of wealthy investors and needs to be considered in concert with other factors such as wealth levels and the characteristics of the advisors they hire,” wrote the authors.
The study goes on to say that for women, retaining a male financial advisor “appears particularly toxic.” Female investors working with male advisors reported “significantly lower risk tolerance, knowledge and confidence,” and held more than 10 percentage points more cash in their portfolios when compared to female investors working with female advisors.
The authors reported finding indications that working with male advisors led to more conservative cash allocations among women.