(Bloomberg) -- Many investors say they don’t consider genderwhen picking a team to manage their money. Maybe they should.

A new report by the CFA Institute, which represents 135,000asset managers globally, found that only about 30 percent of retailand institutional investors think that mixed-gender teams producebetter performance than those staffed only by men.

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Teams including both genders consistently outperform male-onlyinvestment managers, according to a 2015 Morningstar study. It saidequity funds managed by mixed teams ranked higher than those run byeither gender alone over 3, 5 and 10 years.

“Mixed gender teams are beneficial,” said Leah Bennett, vicepresident of Westwood Trust Houston, which manages $22 billion.“But companies haven’t necessarily been aware of that because therearen’t many women in the field. There’s a lack of knowledge aboutwhat mixed-gender teams can do,” said Bennett, who contributed tothe research.

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It’s not just investors who are unaware of the potential of menand women running money together. In apoll of more than 5,000 members worldwide, CFA Institute found thatjust 43 percent of male chartered financial analysts said diversemanagement teams lead to better performance, while 70 percent ofsimilarly qualified women thought it did.

"This difference is interesting since it is more than likelythat the women respondents have been in gender diverse groups andhave witnessed the benefits firsthand," the report said.

While only 30 percent of investors thought diversity broughtbetter returns, another quarter of investors preferred mixed teamsfor the sake of fairness. The remaining investors, almost half,thought combining men and women didn’t matter when managingmoney.

A small but growing minority of clients, particularly publicpension funds, are asking their investment managers to disclosediversity statistics, the report says. CalSTRS, the CaliforniaState Teachers Retirement System, also invested $250 million in anexchange-traded fund created this year to invest in companies withmore women at senior levels. Other states and cities, including NewYork, have programs aimed at developing asset management firms ledby women and minorities.

While women make up about 48 percent of business schoolgraduates in the U.S., they account for only about 28 percent ofthose taking the CFA exam and 16 percent of current CFAs, thereport said.

“A lot of women have been self-selecting out of the industry,”says Bennett, citing films such as “The Big Short” and “The Wolf ofWall Street” for giving young women a negative impression of theindustry. In fact, she says, areas such as wealth investment andimpact investing have a lot of opportunities for women.

“We are asking all of our members to join us in addressing thechronic issue of gender disparity,” said Paul Smith, chiefexecutive officer of the CFA Institute. “The time to end the woefulunder-representation of women in the investment management industryis now.”

Women are better represented in many Asian countries,particularly China, where they make up half of those taking the CFAexam, and Vietnam, where they are more than 40 percent.

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