Women remain a minority in fund management; industry apathetic

Only 6.2 percent of the new funds launched in the past 12 months were assigned to a female manager (Image: pxfuel)

The asset management industry continues to have a highly skewed gender ratio globally, with no real progress being made towards parity in the last one year, shows data.

According to the financial publishing and information company Citywire’s annual publication Alpha Female Report, the share of female portfolio managers now stands at just 12.1 percent, compared with 12 percent in 2022.

Overall, since 2016, the share of female portfolio managers has increased by less than two percentage points. Meanwhile, in India, the share of female portfolio managers currently stands at just 7 percent.

Progress is becoming slower

“The number of female portfolio managers is growing at an even slower pace than before, as a difficult year for asset management is turning into an even worse one for diversity initiatives,” said Margaryta Kirakosian, Editor of Citywire’s Alpha Female Report 2023.

Only 6.2 percent of the new funds launched in the past 12 months were assigned to a female manager. Meanwhile, the overall number of new funds launched halved during the period.

“With fewer new funds being brought to the market, even fewer women will be given the chance to run them,” she said. According to Citywire’s database, only 274 new funds were launched in the past 12 months, compared with 562 over the previous 12 months.

The number of funds run by solo female managers have declined from 1,508 to 1,490 globally. The disparity also becomes evident when the average size of portfolios run by men versus women are compared. On average, men run twice as much money as women, as can be seen from the chart below.

A breakdown of the overall number of fund managers tracked by their domicile shows that Taiwan is ahead of the other financial destinations when it comes to gender parity among portfolio managers. As much as 31 percent of the funds from Taiwan have at least one woman on their team of portfolio managers. In fact, as much as 29 percent of the funds tracked from the region is run by a solo female manager or an all-female team.

Firms need to do more

“The track record of female fund managers remains a major issue, as asset managers often argue they can’t promote women who don’t have enough experience. While this sounds reasonable, qualifying a person for progression involves giving them the chance to run new strategies, which, as Citywire’s Alpha Female Report has shown, firms are not doing,” said the financial information company in a briefing along with the report.

And even when new funds are launched with female portfolio managers, they are more likely to be based on speciality and niche strategies rather than the core strategies that make up the bulk of portfolios. This has also been cited as a reason why, on average, female portfolio managers run less money than their male counterparts.