Magazine Misses Point of Women's Leadership Fund - Building Gender Balanced Business

• You would think that all the evidence would remove doubts, but US News & World Report can only scoff at the latest fund to specialise in companies with good gender balances at the top.

• The US newsmagazine put the Women’s Leadership Fund from the Swiss financial services firm Naissance Capital as 10th on its 2009 list of “The 10 Strangest Mutual Funds”.

• The fund is based, as US News acknowledged, on repeated findings of a correlation between companies with significant percentages of women among the top managers tend and higher profit, better governance and more stable and stronger returns on investment.

• But the fund’s concentration on women doesn’t seem to suit the magazine, which considered Women’s Leadership among the “10 quirkiest funds we could find.” Whether being 10th made it quirkiest or least so was not addressed.

• “When mutual funds step off the beaten path, there’s no telling what will happen,” the report concludes of all vehicles, adding of Women’s Leadership, “this one will come with some risks”.

• Other “strangest” funds picked by US News include the StockCar Stocks Index and one based on investing only when the US Congress is not in session.

The US News report