Women-led companies have historically performed three times better than those with male CEOs

You’ve heard that companies with women executives at the helm tend to perform better than those led by men and a new study furthers that claim, finding that women CEOs in the Fortune 1000 drive three times the returns as S&P 500 enterprises run predominantly by men.

Quantopian, a Boston-based trading platform based on crowdsourced algorithms, pitted the performance of Fortune 1000 companies that had women CEOs between 2002 and 2014 against the S&P 500’s performance during that same period. The comparison showed that the 80 women CEOs during those 12 years produced equity returns 226% better than the S&P 500. (Global nonprofit women’s issues researcher Catalyst compiled the list of women CEOs used in the simulation.)

“It’s based on a buy-and-hold strategy aimed at looking at how well women CEOs have performed cumulatively,” says Karen Rubin, Quantopian’s product manager. She says she is now working with Morningstar to create an algorithm for a fund built on the same premise using real-time data for live trading.