The assets being managed by the Indian Mutual Fund (MF) industry may have crossed the Rs 50 trillion mark, and more than Rs 18,000 crore worth of inflows now come through Systematic Investment Plans (SIP), but there’s one area in which the industry hasn’t made progress: inclusion of women fund managers.
As of this month (March), the number of women fund managers is the same as it was a year ago, at 42. While the number of fund managers has risen to 473 from 428 a year ago, male managers made up for that rise in entirety, going from 386 a year ago to 431. As a result, the percentage of women fund managers has also dipped from 9.81 percent a year ago to 8.88 percent.
This is startling given that three new fund houses entered the Indian MF industry in 2023.
Things are a bit brighter on the value of assets that women fund managers manage: Rs 6.66 crore, up from Rs 4.43 lakh crore a year ago, as per the Morningstar analysis. Last fiscal year, there was a dip in the assets under management by women fund managers on account of two of them (Swati Kulkarni and Lakshmi Iyer) leaving the industry around November 2022.
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In the last three years, the Indian MF industry has added 97 fund managers, of which just 12 were women. However, compared to 2017, when the number of women fund managers stood at just 18, the industry has made some progress.
Are women better fund managers than men?
The Morningstar report points to a more encouraging statistic when it comes to the performance of MF schemes that women managers handle. Of the total open-ended assets under management (AUM) with women fund managers, 70 percent outperformed their peer group average over a 1-year period. Seventy-one percent of the AUM outperformed over a 3-year period and 93.5 percent outperformed over 5 years. “This achievement is truly commendable,” says the report.
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It is worth noting here that not all fund houses have women fund managers. The report says that the 42 women fund managers are spread across 21 fund houses. Five fund houses had three or more women fund managers, five had two, and 11 fund houses had at least 1 woman fund manager.
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