Finance professors at the have found that female executives and board members who buy or sell their own companies’ shares based on nonpublic information get less than half the benefit that men in similar positions gain when they risk insider trades. studied 700,000 insider trades over a period of 20 years.
According to Newsweek, the study showed that:
In the first two months following an insider purchase of their own company’s shares, men typically enjoyed a 19 percent gain in the shares’ value while their female counterparts got just a 9 percent bump. Viewed in dollar terms, the gap looks even worse. Women average only an $80,000 gain per trade while the guys rake in an average of $350,000. Despite these stats, though, the researchers found that women were just as likely to engage in insider trading as men.