Statistically, Women As Head Honchos Can Positively Impact Your Portfolio

Let’s face it guys, multi-tasking has never been our strong suit. The women of the world have this uncanny ability to multi-task and when it comes to running a large corporation, multi-tasking is essential.  When adding the component of ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing screens to your portfolio, one issue that is addressed is diversity in executive positions.

There are approximately 98 female CEOs of 3,049 publicly traded companies. That represents 3.2% of the total company CEOs. When it comes to education, roughly 20.1 million women have bachelor's and/or advanced degrees compared to nearly 18.7 million men – a gap of more than 1.4 million. Considering this, its amazing that such a small amount of women hold the CEO position. 

However, when it comes to performance, women hedge fund managers are quickly making noise. According to a recent index from Rothstein Kass, female hedge fund managers produced a return of 8.95% from the start of 2012 through the third quarter. The HFRX Global Hedge Fund Index, released by Hedge Fund Research, only grew by a 2.69% during the same time period. 

The following list consists of 10 female CEOs who run some of the most highly valued corporations, from the fields of technology to retail along with energy service and aerospace: 

1.     Meg Whitman, HP (HPQ)                  

2.     Virginia Rometty, IBM  (IBM)         

3.     Patricia A. Woertz, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)  

4.     Indra K. Nooyi, Pepsi Co, (PEP) 

5.     Irene B. Rosenfeld, Mondelez Intl. (MDLZ) 

6.     Marillyn Hewson, Lockheed Martin, (LMT)