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In Real Estate, It Pays to Put Women on the Board, Study Shows

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U.S. Gender-Equality Rankings

Real estate is still largely a man’s world, but companies with women on the board are the ones rewarding investors.

Wells Fargo & Co. analysts Jeffrey Donnelly and Dori Kesten examined the gender makeup of boards of 165 U.S. real estate investment trusts from 2006 to 2017. They found that shares of REITs with a greater-than-average share of female directors outperformed REITs with all-male boards by 2.33 percentage points over five years.