Three reasons why women should lead household retirement planning

Women may be more far-sighted

Retirement planning is an excruciatingly hard exercise in delayed gratification. Some studies show women are more naturally inclined to be long-term thinkers. When Russell Investments asked 343 financial advisors which gender tended to have more of a long-term planning focus, women won 56 percent to 5 percent. (The remainder said it was a toss-up.)

Women are more patient and less (overly) confident

Fifteen years ago, economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean scoured the investment accounts of more than 35,000 households for trading data. They found that men traded nearly 50 percent more frequently than women, and pointed to overconfidence as a behavioral tic of male investors. The kicker: The researchers also found that the net return for the men in the study was nearly one percentage point lower than for women.

More recently, robo-advisory Betterment noted that in the two years leading up to early January, 2014, men tended to check their portfolios 45 percent more than women. Men also changed their allocations 20 percent more often than women. That’s not best practice for patient buy-and-hold success, and trying to time the market has a notoriously bad record. And when clients strayed from Betterment’s suggested asset allocation, a higher percentage of those adopting a riskier asset mix were men:

The flip side: Studies also show that women can be overly conservative investors. So while women in traditional marriages may be the logical choice to lead retirement planning, putting both brains to work can produce the best results.