To all those men feeling the heat from investment fallout and financial stress: Before you call your planner, you might want to chat up your sweetie.

Just as numbers talk in investments, they’re talking on the home front, with more women handling day-to-day family finance and assuming leadership in investing, according to the 2013 Couples Retirement Survey by Fidelity Investments. Twenty-four percent of women assume the reins for daily financial decisions — up from 15 percent in 2011 — and 19 percent shoulder the responsibility for long-term retirement decisions.

As more women take active investing roles, you might wonder: Which gender makes for the better investor? Researchers have asked the same question, and their findings might surprise you.

Men often think they have the upper hand. But “research points to cases where this doesn’t hold, and women actually outperform relative to men,” says Abigail Sussman, assistant professor at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and member of the Morningstar Behavioral Science Advisory Board.

Gary Dayton, founder and trading coach at Glastonbury, Connecticut-based TradingPsychologyEdge.com, has a similar view. “Women tend to be calmer, possess a longer-term outlook, do more research on their investments and remain steady under pressure.”

From early 2007 through October 2009 — a big bear market phase in U.S. stocks — women cashed out equity positions at a 10 percent lower rate than men, according to a Vanguard study of 2.7 million IRA investors. “Men were more likely to trade than women during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, and they did so at the wrong times. Men were much more likely to sell stock at market lows,” Dayton says.

So what exactly can men learn from women when it comes to investing?

If you don’t know something, take time to learn. Men show more overconfidence than women in investing, Dayton says. “Overconfidence can lead men to take on too much risk and invest in companies they really don’t know. Men also tend to believe their interpretations of news and market movement is sound and feel they can make profitable trading decisions, but this isn’t as true as they may think,” he says.

By contrast, women “are more likely to recognize and acknowledge when they don’t know something. If they don’t feel they know a company well enough to invest in it, they do more research or stand aside,” Dayton says.

Stick with your investment plan and trade less. Sussman pointed out that men trade 45 percent more than women, according to a 2001 academic paper, “Boys Will Be Boys: Gender Overconfidence and Common Stock Investment.” Paraphrasing the study, Sussman says the authors found that “men trade more excessively than women, which they attribute to overconfidence, and that this hurts portfolio returns relative to a lower level of active trading.”

Men could also borrow a page from the patience playbook, as there may be no need to monitor retirement investments on a daily basis.

Generally speaking, women may have more patience when it comes to investing, which can be a benefit over the long term. “Women are more likely to give their investments time to grow. This is important because checking returns and acting on short-term fluctuations in stock performance leads to negative outcomes,” Sussman says.

Take less risk. Biology may be a factor for men. “Recent studies show that hormones such as testosterone and cortisol can bring on excessive optimism and risky trading behavior in men. Men need to be consciously aware of this strong tendency,” Dayton says.

“Women are more risk-averse than men, and men can learn from this attribute. Men can view trading and investing as a game rather than as a business. They are more likely to seek out and trade the hot stock tip and take poorly planned trades,” Dayton says.

But risk cuts both ways — and to generate higher returns over the long run, some risk may be necessary. Women can learn from men when it comes to this aspect of investing.

“In addition to investing in higher beta stocks, men put a higher portion of their money in the stock market broadly compared to the lowest-risk assets. This benefits them when investing over the long term,” Sussman says. “If women would let themselves take bigger risks by allocating more of their savings to a diversified portfolio of stocks, this would help their money grow over time.”

When it comes to investing, neither gender is perfect. Perhaps both sexes can learn from each other. “Men are likely to be too confident and optimistic about both their own performance and future market returns, while women are not confident or optimistic enough about either one. Ideally, there is an appropriate middle ground,” Sussman says.

So what is the bottom line?

“It seems as though both men and women have an underlying belief that they need to be star stock pickers to have successful growth in their portfolios, which leads to negative overreactions on both sides based on beliefs about ability. But this isn’t the case — it’s not necessary to pick the single best-performing stock in order to improve the performance of most portfolios over time. Instead, we can focus on overall market exposure,” Sussman says.

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Are Women Better Investors Than Men? originally appeared on usnews.com