Why Women Outperform Men in the Market but Worry More About Retirement

​Article Summary:
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Despite a statistically better long-term performance record than men, women tend to worry about money more. That combination sounds contradictory until you look at what women are actually up against: a longer lifespan to fund, more career interruptions, lower lifetime earnings, and a wealth management industry built around someone else's financial life. The anxiety starts to make a lot more sense once you do the math.

If you look at the cold, hard data, women make great long-term investors. Multiple massive datasets confirm it: they trade less, follow the plan, and routinely outperform men over the long run.

Yet, when surveying a general audience of women about how they feel about their financial future, the answers rarely invoke confidence. Instead, women report significantly higher financial anxiety, worry more about outliving their savings, and are far less likely to even call themselves "investors."¹

Why does this paradox exist?

The answer: women aren't "lacking confidence"; instead, they are accurately calculating a much more difficult economic problem.

To bridge this gap, we have to look past standard industry narratives and examine exactly why superior performance and heightened anxiety coexist -- and why acknowledging this paradox is the key to fixing the system.

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Behind the Numbers
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Fidelity's 2021 analysis of 5.2 million customer accounts found women outperformed men by 40 basis points annually over ten years.² Wells Fargo's analysis of more than 50,000 accounts from 2018 through 2024 found female-led accounts posted the highest risk-adjusted returns in the sample, while taking on 13% less volatility.³ Warwick Business School put the outperformance gap at 1.8%.⁴

The performance gap between women and men can be traced back to a specific set of behaviors that long-term investing happens to reward.

Women often trade less. They're much more likely to build a plan and stick with it.
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When markets fall, only 8% of women liquidate retirement holdings, compared to 15% of men.⁵ They're less likely to chase a new hot trend.

In 2021, 41% of female investors said they weren't interested in cryptocurrency, versus 24% of men.⁶ In a Merrill Lynch study of 35,000 households, married women outperformed men by at least one percentage point, single women by one and a half.⁷

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Re-evaluating the "Confidence" Metric

In behavioral finance, the cost of overconfidence is well-documented. Brad Barber and Terrance Odean's seminal study on overconfidence and gender found that men traded 45% more than women, reducing their risk-adjusted returns by 1.4% as a result. For single men versus single women, that performance gap widened to 2.3%.⁸

The data suggests a profound irony: the traditional financial world has long treated the male relationship with risk as the default standard. Yet modern hyper-transactional platforms -- from gamified trading apps like Robinhood to prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi -- where user bases skew overwhelmingly young and male, frequently reward recklessness over strategy.
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A recent Morning Consult study found that 71% of prediction market users are men under 45,⁹ and just over a quarter of American men aged 18–24 reported using a prediction market or gambling app in the past six months.¹⁰

When a 2025 eToro analysis reviewed more than 80 women-focused reports from the financial industry, it found that more than half portrayed women's investing habits in patronizing terms: "too nervous," "unsure where to start," or "too scared of losing money." Only one in five acknowledged that the caution the industry called a flaw is the exact variable driving women's superior returns.¹¹

The industry spent decades trying to fix a confidence problem women didn't have, rather than studying the strengths they already possessed.

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Why Financial Anxiety Is a Rational Response
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To truly validate the differences in financial experience between men and women, we must decouple investment capability from financial anxiety. The outsized anxiety for women in personal finance is not a symptom of under-confidence, but an entirely accurate reading of a complex, structural retirement problem.

The retirement risk women face is objectively larger and defined by variables men rarely have to calculate:

• The Longevity Gap: Women live five to seven years longer than men on average, meaning their capital must stretch much further.¹² Because they are far more likely to navigate the final years of life solo, future healthcare and long-term care needs must be proactively funded ahead of time.
  
  
• The Wealth Gap: Women earn less over their lifetimes (around 81 cents for every dollar men make) -- a gap that widens significantly with age.¹³
  
  
• The Caregiving Tax: Women are disproportionately more likely to take career breaks for caregiving. Each year out of the workforce reduces lifelong income, retirement contributions, and Social Security credits.¹⁴
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Because of these compounding dynamics, the National Institute on Retirement Security found that women aged 65 and older are 80% more likely than men of the same age to live in poverty.¹⁵
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Given these statistics, it's no wonder women's financial fears are more pointed than their male counterparts. They are navigating a system where the baseline margin for error is simply much narrower.

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Designing a System That Fits

Women seek professional financial guidance at higher rates than men. Half of women report working with a financial advisor, compared to just 37% of men,¹⁶ and 86% say professional management actively reduces their stress.¹⁷ By every behavioral measure, women are the ideal long-term clients.

However, the wealth management infrastructure hasn't fully caught up to their capacity for financial growth. Only 23% of U.S. financial advisors are women.¹⁸ More importantly, the industry's standard framework, which is built around short-term benchmark comparisons and asset accumulation, was originally designed around a linear, uninterrupted career path.

In reality, a woman’s financial trajectory is uniquely shaped by variables the traditional model treats as afterthoughts: career gaps for caregiving, a significantly longer lifespan, and the stark economic realities of widowhood. And when this framework fails to fit, women don't typically push back; they often disengage. Avoidance becomes the path of least resistance, inadvertently reinforcing the anxiety the system was supposed to solve.¹⁹

The discipline that makes women terrific long-term investors can stall into paralysis when the surrounding infrastructure fails to meet their actual needs.

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Moving Forward

Good financial planning for women starts with a wealth management industry that treats their unique structural realities as a feature.

That means building portfolios that prioritize longevity over generic age-based rules. It means navigating income decisions through the lens of a longer lifespan. And it means factoring caregiving timelines directly into the mathematical model.

For a woman building wealth, the anxiety is real because the stakes are so high. A financial plan tailored specifically to these variables converts that protective worry into structured action.

Women controlled roughly $18 trillion in U.S. assets in 2023, a figure projected to nearly double by 2030 as a massive spousal wealth transfer takes place.²⁰ That capital is already being managed by people with sound instincts and a clear-eyed read on their own risk. It's time for the advice industry to catch up.



More Reading:
The Deferral Decade: The Hidden Price of 'Surviving' Middle Age​
Americans Are Spending Less on People and More on Screens. Here's What That's Costing Us.
Why the Best Way to Spend Money on Yourself is to Spend It on Someone Else
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References:
1. Nationwide Financial. Women and Retirement Survey. nationwide.com
2. Fidelity Investments. (2021). Women and Investing Study. Analysis of 5.2 million customer accounts, 2011–2020.
3. Wells Fargo. (2024). Gender and Investing: Risk-Adjusted Returns Analysis. Internal study of 50,000+ accounts, 2018–2024.
4. Warwick Business School. (2018). Do Women Make Better Investors Than Men? Study of 2,800 investors over three years.
5. Nationwide Financial. Women and Retirement Survey. nationwide.com
6. Fidelity Investments Canada / MassMutual. (2021). Women and Cryptocurrency Survey.
7. Merrill Lynch / Age Wave. (2018). Women and Financial Wellness: Beyond the Bottom Line. Study of 35,000 households.
8. Barber, B. M., & Odean, T. (2001). Boys will be boys: Gender, overconfidence, and common stock investment. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 116(1), 261–292.
9. Morning Consult. (2025). Prediction Markets User Demographics Study. 71% of current prediction market users are men under the age of 45.
10. American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM) & Ipsos. (2025). Poll on prediction market and gambling app usage among American men aged 18–24.
11. eToro. (2025). Women and Investing: A Review of 80+ Financial Industry Reports.
12. CDC / Social Security Administration actuarial data on gender longevity gap.
13. U.S. Census Bureau / Bureau of Labor Statistics. Current Population Survey. Women earn approximately $0.81 for every dollar earned by men.
14. Center for American Progress. The Women's Leadership Gap: Women's Leadership by the Numbers.
15. National Institute on Retirement Security. (2020). Retirement Insecurity 2021: Americans' Views of Retirement. Women 65+ are 80% more likely than men to be in poverty.
16. Wells Fargo. (2021). Women and Financial Wellness Study.
17. Fidelity Investments. (2021). Women and Investing Study.
18. CFP Board / Financial Planning Association. 2023 Adviser Demographics Report. 23% of U.S. financial advisors are women.
19. Kiplinger / Journal of Financial Planning research on financial anxiety and engagement avoidance behavior.
20. McKinsey Global Institute. (2023). Women and Wealth: The $18 Trillion Opportunity.