Step four, separate transaction types
The phrase “buy/sell over time” sounds straightforward until you inspect the codes. In SEC Form 4 data, acquisitions and dispositions can arise from open-market trades, option exercises, grants, tax withholding, gifts, and conversions. MAR notices also include a range of transaction types. If you want a meaningful gender comparison, open-market buys should be isolated from administrative or compensation-driven events.
Otherwise you risk writing an article about conviction and accidentally measuring payroll mechanics.
What the trend probably looks like, market by market
Without the article-specific extraction from our 162,000 filings, we cannot print a league table. We can still state the likely shape of the data, because the institutional drivers are visible.
France is likely among the leaders in female filer share
France’s board reforms were early and binding. If your filing population includes directors, France should show a relatively high and rising female share from 2015 onward. The increase may be less dramatic in executive-only subsets, because board parity has progressed faster than C-suite parity.
This is one of those cases where the filing tape probably confirms what governance data has shown for years: France moved early, and the paperwork should reflect it.
The Nordics may score well, but for different reasons
Nordic markets often rank strongly on board and leadership representation, though legal routes differ by country. In filing data, that can produce high female filer shares, especially where listed-company governance structures make directors highly visible in disclosures. Again, role splits matter. A market can look progressive on all filers and less so on executive filers.
The US may look better in structured data than in broad representation
The SEC filing regime is clean, which makes it analytically attractive. But the scope differs from MAR markets, and the listed universe is vast and sectorally uneven. Female representation among directors has improved materially over the decade, helped by investor pressure and exchange-level board diversity initiatives, though those initiatives have had a more complicated legal afterlife than their press releases suggested.
In practice, the US may produce excellent charts and messier comparisons.
The UK and continental Europe likely show steady gains, with local quirks
The UK’s post-Brexit regime remains close enough to MAR to support directional comparison. Across Europe, the broad trend should be upward from 2015 to 2026, though the slope will vary with board reforms, sector composition, and data quality. Smaller markets may show more volatility simply because the annual number of unique filers is lower.
The behavioural question: do women file differently?
This is the part readers usually want, and the part that most deserves restraint.
Women may appear less often in raw buy counts for structural reasons
Open-market insider buying is relatively rare compared with selling. If women remain underrepresented in the senior population, they will also be underrepresented among buyers in raw counts. That does not imply lower conviction, lower skill, or a different risk appetite. It may simply reflect fewer opportunities to appear in the sample.
The right comparison is conditional: among comparable roles, sectors, firm sizes, and compensation structures, do women and men differ in the probability of filing a buy, the average size of buys, or the timing around corporate events? That is a proper research design. Anything simpler is usually a personality test for the author.
Sales are a poor proxy for sentiment
Sales dominate many insider datasets because executives receive equity compensation, diversify, meet tax obligations, and follow pre-arranged plans. If women are newer entrants to the C-suite, they may have different vesting schedules or smaller accumulated holdings, which could alter sale patterns mechanically. A naive chart of “female share of sales” may therefore tell you more about tenure and pay design than about behaviour.
The more useful question is whether representation gains reached the informative subset
For investors, the most interesting subset is often discretionary open-market buying by senior executives. If female share has risen in all filings but remains low in this narrow subset, that could mean one of several things: women are concentrated in non-trading roles, underrepresented in the most powerful executive positions, or simply too few in number for stable annual estimates. Any of those would be worth reporting. None should be guessed.