Women Account for a Smaller Percentage of Managers Today, Compared With 2002

Women make up a smaller share of portfolio managers in the US than they did 20 years ago, but funds are also more likely to include at least one woman portfolio manager today. This is partly due to asset-management firms increasing the size of portfolio-management teams to reduce key-person risk and address successions. Meanwhile, Morningstar research also shows that there isn’t a significant relationship between portfolio-manager gender and fund performance.

How We Measure Gender Representation on Fund Management Teams

This study considers all open-end and exchange-traded funds globally with available portfolio-manager gender data. Generally, gender data is either disclosed to Morningstar or derived from pronouns in portfolio manager biographies.

The fund universe has more than tripled over the course of the past two decades. At the end of 2024, this study counted nearly 62,000 open-end and exchange-traded funds, which is more than 3 times greater than the 18,700 funds counted at the beginning of the period in 2002.

Women Account for 11% of Managers on US Funds

At the end of 2024, women accounted for 11% of portfolio managers in the US, down from 13% when our records began in 2002.

Representation of women among portfolio managers is generally higher in other markets, but most of those markets have also seen declining representation. Exceptions include South Korea, Portugal, and Sweden, where the percentage of portfolio managers that are women is more than 50% higher than in 2002. But these markets are very small compared with the US. In South Korea and Portugal, total portfolio-management ranks number 169 and 53, respectively, and women account for one fourth of those totals. Meanwhile, women represent 15% of the 460 managers in Sweden.

The study relies on a fund’s domicile to assign portfolio managers to geographical markets; this is an imperfect match that may not reflect a portfolio manager’s residence. Also, because the data is grouped first by a fund’s domicile, then filtered by unique manager, some managers will be counted multiple times across different domiciles.

Women Run More Funds Than They Did in 2002

Although women make up a smaller share of portfolio managers than they did 20 years ago, they have broader reach. At the end of 2024, nearly 30% of US-domiciled funds included at least one female portfolio manager, up from 23% in 2002.

This is largely due to asset-management firms increasing the size of portfolio-management teams to reduce key-person risk and address successions, but it could also be a result of new funds naming multiple managers from the get-go.

Funds with women managers are more common today than they were in 2002, with Portuguese funds seeing the greatest increase, having quadrupled to 27% from 6% in 2002. Also, roughly one fourth of all funds in France and Italy include at least one woman manager, up from 17% in 2002.

Still, of the large markets in our study (those with gender data for portfolio-management teams on more than 1,000 funds), US funds are the most likely to include at least one woman manager. For comparison, in Australia and the United Kingdom, only 17% and 20% of funds count at least one woman manager, respectively.

Broadening the Bench Creates Career Opportunities

Zeroing in on the US, the largest driver for the increase in funds with at least one woman portfolio manager has been the shift toward a team-manager approach and away from a solo portfolio manager. Meanwhile, nearly 60% of US actively managed funds were run by men at the end of 2024, compared with nearly 70% 10 years ago. The chart below shows the number of actively managed funds in the US, grouped by the gender composition of their portfolio-management roster.

At the end of 2024, less than 14% of actively managed funds had just one portfolio manager, down more than 10 percentage points compared with 10 years ago. In percentage terms, funds run by solo woman managers have lost the most ground, dropping to 1.8% of funds from 3.4% of funds 10 years ago. This is followed closely by the number of funds run by solo managers that are men.

The greatest increase, in absolute and percentage terms, has been among funds run by mixed-gender teams. In 2014, the 2,000-plus funds run by mixed-gender teams accounted for 26.7% of the total, rising to 3,741 funds and nearly 40% of the total by the end of 2024. There are more women-only and men-only teams than there were 10 years ago, although the percentage of funds run by men has decreased slightly.

One in Three Passive Funds Had a Woman Manager in 2007

Women are more likely to be named on passive index-tracking strategies, compared with actively managed funds. This is true globally as well as within the US, although the difference is greater in the US.

At the end of 2024, nearly 30% of passive funds globally counted at least one woman manager, down slightly from the 33% peak in 2007 but up significantly from the low of 20% in 2004. Meanwhile, representation on actively managed funds rose steadily but modestly over the time period, approaching 20% at the end of 2024.

In the US, the percentage of passive funds with at least one woman portfolio manager also peaked in 2007 at nearly 50%, rising a meteoric 30 percentage points over the course of three years.

Similar to the pattern seen for funds in other markets, the share of actively managed funds with at least one woman manager climbed steadily over the past two decades, landing just above 25% at the end of 2024.

Alternative Fund Management Teams Are Almost All Men

The likelihood of a fund counting at least one woman manager is fairly even whether it’s an equity fund, a fixed-income fund, or an allocation fund. In all three asset classes, roughly 22% of funds globally are run by gender-diverse teams. But alternative funds—which include event-driven and relative value arbitrage strategies—are relatively unlikely to include women managers. At the end of 2024, less than 10% of alternative funds were run by gender-diverse teams, down from the 12% spike in 2004 but slightly above the 8% seen in 2002.

US-domiciled funds have shown more variation, along with more overall representation of women, over the past two decades. The share of allocation and fixed-income funds with at least one woman manager has increased significantly since low points more than 10 years ago. At the end of 2024, nearly 35% of allocation funds were run by gender-diverse teams, up from 21% in 2014.

The percentage of alternative funds with at least one woman manager has varied greatly and generally declined over the past two decades, but it is also the smallest of the four asset-class groups shown here, with just 304 funds at the end of 2024 (compared with 6,600 equity funds). The share of alternative funds run by gender-diverse teams peaked at 23% in 2010 but fell to 15% by the end of 2024.

Women Leading the Charge

This next part of the study examined manager data for more than 2,000 female managers on funds based in the US, Canada, and Europe. The table below highlights the top 10 women fund managers in terms of the assets they oversee. Many of the funds and assets included here are run by teams, so the workload is shared, but we avoided estimating the division of duties because doing so would surely miss the mark.

Gender Has Little to No Impact on Performance

While differences in representation are clear—funds run by gender-diverse teams make up less than half of the group in every major market, asset class, and management style—differences in performance are not.

The greatest reason for this is the sheer difference in sample sizes; it isn’t advisable to draw conclusions from a comparison of 5,700 men-only funds and fewer than 250 women-only funds. Slicing the groups by relevant peer groups and category benchmarks, as one should, reduces the sample sizes further. Still, investment performance is paramount, so we took a look.

The exhibits below show peer-relative performance for nearly 18,000 funds based in the US, Canada, and Europe. Because this section focuses on manager skills, only actively managed funds are included, and performance is evaluated before fees.

In short, there isn’t a discernible difference in performance whether a fund is run by women, men, or a mixed-gender team. The chart below shows the percentage of funds within each gender-composition group that ranked in the top, second, third, or bottom quartile of their respective Morningstar Categories.

Our sample skews positive because it excludes funds that were liquidated or merged away before December 2024. Generally, asset managers shut down funds that aren’t performing well.

Overall, the distribution of funds across their respective categories was close, considering men-only and mixed-gender portfolio-management teams. In both cases, between 21% and 28% of such funds landed in each of the four quartiles and mostly within 1 percentage point of an even 25% split. Women-only teams produced more variation, with nearly one third of funds landing in the top quartile and less than 20% in the third quartile.

Factoring risk into the equation doesn’t materially change the result. Here, we used the information ratio, which measures the consistency of a fund’s risk-adjusted outperformance compared with that of an appropriate benchmark.

Of the three gender-composition groupings studied, women-only and men-only teams are most similar in terms of risk-adjusted performance, with about 30% of funds in the top quartile and just 20% in the bottom quartile. Mixed-gender teams fared worse, although they were almost perfectly split at 25% in each quartile. Altogether, the study didn’t find a significant relationship between portfolio-manager gender and fund performance.

Wynona Lam, Quentin Bartram, Maciej Kowara, Bridget B. Hughes, and Nora Everly contributed to this article.