December 18, 2022

Narrowing the Gender Gap

Reported by Judy Ward

What will it take to attract more women to plan advisory work, and for them to stick with it as a career? “I think the first step, even before recruiting women, is to set up for a diverse workforce to succeed,” ProCourse Fiduciary Advisors’ Brea Dantin says.

“Many times, folks might just default to, ‘Do we have the right maternity and paternity leave policy?’” Dantin says. “I think it’s more than that. I think it’s how we structure the job positions. I think it’s how we mentor women. I think it’s listening to what we have to say when we’re talking about our work.”

It takes more than good intentions to narrow the gender gap in the advisory ranks, and Strategic Retirement Partners’ Jeff Cullen says advisory firms need to be intentional about taking actions that facilitate more women making a career as an adviser. “I don’t think it’s any secret that our industry skews heavily to older, white male advisers,” he says. “If you really mean it about changing that, then you’ve got to get really intentional about it, and change both the way you bring people into the organization and your ability to home-grow them.” Today, six of his firm’s seven directors are women.

Rick Shoff of CAPTRUST is asked why a gender gap in plan advisory work remains. “I don’t know if there’s anything specific that our industry historically has done that causes women to not ‘lean in’ and stay with it,” he says. “But there was a time when there wasn’t a specific focus on trying to get diversity in the adviser ranks. That has changed—it has certainly changed for us. Now, we’re really focused on this. We know we can get better, but we’ve got to be intentional about it.”

In 2017, CAPTRUST launched its Women’s Initiative for women on its advisory teams. Currently, 27% of CAPTRUST advisers are women, and one of CAPTRUST’s goals for the Women’s Initiative is for its members to help the firm recruit more women to join as advisers. “But the goal is, first and foremost, for the women to support each other, and be able to talk about the things that matter to them,” Shoff says. For example, the group has a conference annually and events throughout the year that allow members to learn and to build relationships. “I think there was a time when that kind of support wasn’t going on in the retirement industry,” he adds. “Women were looking around the industry and saying, ‘Does anyone know I’m out here?’”

Having a woman adviser as a mentor can help encourage other women to stick with it as a career, says Oswald Financial’s Deena Rini. “Many times, women advisers are not seeing anyone who has had a career path similar to the one they want to have, and that’s a struggle,” she says. “It’s hard to go through your career without a mentor who has had an experience that’s similar to yours.” It helps to have mentoring support from a colleague who can relate to the challenges women can face with building their career and with work/life balance, she says.

Many of the issues with closing the gender gap boil down to giving women on an advisory team the right opportunities to develop and succeed, Rini says. “I think that opportunity is so attractive,” she says, referring, for example, to having the chance to develop an expertise in doing one-on-one meetings with participants. There is a big need among participants for the kind of empathetic approach many women can bring to conversations about topics such as budgeting and saving money, she says. “So many women are emotionally intelligent,” she says. “There’s a huge opportunity for women advisers to be able to relate to their client base.”

To offer real growth opportunities, an advisory firm needs to understand how a woman adviser wants to build her career. “It’s about making sure to listen to the opportunities that women advisers say they want,” Rini says. “I think women want to be empowered to make a difference. They want to be trusted to do that.”

Read more on this topic: