How masculine is your portfolio?

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These left-wing feminists are demeaning the entire world. No matter where we men go, we are no longer allowed to be men. We have to wear seatbelts, can’t eat red meat anymore, and take the trash out when all we really want to do is this:

At least when it comes to our portfolios, we are still men.

Hans Peter Grüner from the University of Mannheim and Christoph Siemroth from the University of Essex are proper blokes. Why they invited a woman to do their research project is beyond me. Probably some university DEI requirement.

In any case, they looked at how male portfolio managers invest and compared their portfolios to those of female managers.

Obviously, we men are genetically different from women, and this means we are better in our consumption and investment habits. Here is a chart of the differences between genders when consuming and investing in different consumer categories.

Gender differences in consumption and investment shares

Source: Grüner et al. (2025)

For all those women, male feminists, vegetarians, Gen Z people and other snowflakes reading this, let me explain the chart: A positive number means men are consuming more of it than women, a negative number means women consume more of it than men. Same for the investments. And a correlation of 0.5 means that these two things are practically the same (trust me, I know my maths because I am a man). We men buy what we believe in, in our portfolios and real life.

Now, the two upstanding blokes and the DEI hire created the Portfolio Masculinity Index (PMI), which measures how much any given portfolio of a fund manager resembles the portfolio of the typical male fund manager. It’s a great index. It’s the best index. Some say it’s the only index you ever need.

With this index, you can identify the investment biases of male fund managers and see which investments are masculine and which are for the weak. And you can check how much men outperform by investing in these strong masculine assets.

The eggheads find that “masculine investment behaviour adversely affects fund performance”. I don’t know what ‘adverse’ means because I am too cool for school and always have been, but I think it means ‘better’. They also find that “even within the group of male fund managers, those with less masculine portfolios perform better”. I think that is a typo, and it should read ‘worse’. But then again, real men don’t have time for spell check.

But they also do something cool, as only real men can do. We know there are more male than female portfolio managers, so they tried to estimate how much investments in different sectors would change if female fund managers controlled the same amount of assets as males.

They find that investment in strong, masculine sectors like energy and power generation (‘utilities’) would decline significantly while investments in technology, materials, and healthcare would rise. In other words, energy and utility companies trade at a premium because more men are in the investor community than women. And that’s how it should be, godammit.

Investment shifts if men and women were to control the same volume of funds

Source: Grüner et al. (2025)

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