Female Power Players

This is a series I've wanted to work on for years.

As a freelance writer in the real estate space for over two decades, I've been inspired by a lot of the women I've worked with. Many of them are highly successful, educated business owners leading large teams of agents. Their achievements speak for themselves.

But the more I paid attention, the more I realized that their success hits different when you factor in the context. These women built what they built while navigating a society that has treated them as less than for basically all of recorded history.

I'm not claiming to be some enlightened individual for noticing that. Honestly, if I had read something like this 20 years ago, I probably would have rolled my eyes. Experience, age, and a lot of reading have a way of changing your perspective on things.

Women Are Better Investors. Seriously.

As I've worked to become a better investor, reading as much as I can and making plenty of mistakes along the way, I kept running into the same finding: women are statistically more successful investors than men.

They trade less, research more, and are less likely to make emotionally driven decisions.

Fidelity analyzed 5.2 million accounts and found that women outperformed men by 40 basis points annually on average. A Warwick Business School study found a similar gap, with women outperforming men by 1.8 percent over a three-year period.

The reason is not complicated. Patience and discipline beat ego and overconfidence almost every time.

If you're looking to sharpen your own investing habits, a few books worth your time: One Up On Wall Street by Peter Lynch, The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, and The Little Book That Still Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt.

Women Are Better Communicators, Too

It's not just investing. Decades of research consistently show that women score higher on the communication traits that actually move the needle in business: empathy, active listening, and the ability to read a room.

The data backs it up: meta-analyses of thousands of leaders show that women excel in transformational leadership—specifically in coaching and attentiveness. Further studies across 26 countries confirm women consistently score higher in empathy-driven traits like tendermindedness and agreeableness.

Empathy has been shown to improve negotiation outcomes, increase team creativity, and strengthen leadership effectiveness across industries. It turns out the soft skills aren't soft at all.

To be fair, "better communicators" is context-dependent. Directness has its advantages, and a lot of the research acknowledges that some of these differences reflect socialized behavior as much as anything else. Women may communicate the way they do in part because they've had to navigate environments where authority wasn't automatically extended to them. That adaptation looks a lot like skill, because it is.

What Would the World Look Like?

I've spent time thinking about what the world would look like if women had always been given the place they deserve. Not in a dramatic way. Just honestly.

How many conflicts could have been avoided? It's naive to pretend that women haven't been running things behind the scenes throughout history, because they have. But imagine what happens when they get to do it in the open, with full credit and no asterisk.

Which brings me to chess.

Chess is one of the oldest strategy games in existence, with roots going back roughly 1,500 years to 6th-century India, where it was known as chaturanga. The game spread through Persia, then into the Islamic world, and eventually into medieval Europe, where it was transformed into something closer to what we play today.

Here's the interesting part. In the earliest versions of the game, the piece we now call the queen was actually a male advisor, the weakest piece on the board, limited to moving just one square diagonally. When the game arrived in Europe in the late 15th century, right around the time Isabella of Castile was reshaping the political map of the world, something changed. The advisor became the queen. And the queen became the most powerful piece on the board, able to move in any direction, any number of squares.

Historians still debate exactly why the change happened, but the timing is hard to ignore. Strong queens were on the throne across Europe, and the game seemed to catch up with reality. Someone knew something.

Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria are both on my list for future profiles in this series, for good reason.

Who This Series Is About

Female Power Players will profile women across industries and eras: real estate, finance, science, art, philanthropy. Some you'll know. Many you won't. All of them earned their seat at the table and then some.

The series kicks off with one of the most inspiring stories to cross my desk in years. Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree was a philanthropist who donated millions to Santa Barbara institutions, ran an aerospace company into her 90s, and still found time to work in a soup kitchen once a week. Her former Montecito estate is now on the market at $18.95 million, but her real legacy can't be listed.

Her $18.95M estate is a masterpiece, but the woman behind it was the real force of nature. Read: True Wealth — The Story of Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree.

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