Proceedings

more likely to come up with a creative way to remember the events or values, a better
ability to adapt and respond to uncertainty that could improve their results in recency
bias.
Women are more pessimistic (see the result in optimism bias), realist (see the results
in overconfidence bias), risk adverse and regret adverse that men. The thinks are
connected because the higher proportion of regret aversion is somehow determined of
the general differences between man and women in those aspects (Zeelenberg et
al.,1996; Ben –Ze’ev, 2000; Seiler,j.M., Viccky, l.S., Traub, S., Harrison, D.M.,
2008). The differences between genders could be explained using the knowledge of a
new field of cellular biology called epigenetic. The scientists promote the idea that the
main characteristic of a cell (in our case of our investor, man or woman) could be
better explained by the environment they live (the neighbour cells, their state and
local processes) than by their genetic determinants. The creation of sub-conscious
memory in the first year of life as a basis for 95% of our futures actions could make
us believe that the different environment we create for children, the different approach
in raising them could be a determinant of the differences we are noticing in their adult
life. The permanent encouragement for boys to be courageous, not to fear anything
and not to show their emotions could be seen in the action of the potential men
investors.
As one can see in mental accounting women seem to be again more biased than men.
One could say that it is normal to see this in the financial field too because it is really
common in the real non-financial life. Women are more used and more capable that
men to solve multi-task problems (Sinha, 2005) using the mental acocounting to
separate the career and different fields of the personal life in order to try to reach their
goals in both.
6. GENDER INFLUENCES IN ASSET ALLOCATION MODEL
The classic finance proposes portfolios build on the rule of return/risk optimization. It
is certain from what we have already discuss that men and women investors are not
alike and a common strategy for both could not be appropriate.
More, a portfolio who does not account for the biases the investor could be
susceptible to, based on the idea of investor rationality could not hold if we are aware
of the multiple examples of human irrationality and capital market lack of efficiency.
That is why sometimes the proposed portfolio should depart from the efficiency
frontier incorporating gender differences and the susceptibility to a specific set of
biases. For instance if the general mean-variance output recommendation would be
65% bonds and 35% shares it is more than possible to increase the proportion of riskfree
asset in portfolio for women or to decrease it for a man, after analysing the biases
he is susceptible of. One should see the portfolio as a tailor-made one, specific to each
investor and to accept a departure from the classical optimum because the optimum
portfolio is the one which brings the expected return but also allows the investor to be
able to sleep.
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