We all know Hollywood can be tough on women. When Kathryn Bigelow won Best Director for The Hurt Locker in 2010, she became the first-ever female director since 1929 – the inaugural year of the Academy Awards – to win this coveted award. But Hollywood is hardly an outlier. There’s another high profile, big money industry where women have been historically underrepresented. In the upper echelons of financial management and investment services, female workers have long been notoriously scarce.
According to 2017 Catalyst women in Finance report, women represent nearly 50% of all employees in global financial industry. However the gender gap pay remains high.
As women in finance advance in their financial services career, their representations in senior levels decline. Globally, only 25% of women hold senior level manager roles and only 4% are CEOs. Clearly a lot of work is required to overcome these barriers.
Declining numbers among women studying finance paired with low job satisfaction demands a creative solution to combat this acute problem. Fortunately, there might be a game changer on the horizon: Girls Who Invest (GWI), a nonprofit organization founded with an ambitious mission that by 2030, 30% of the world’s capital will be managed by women.
Increasing women’s participation in portfolio management and executive leadership is key not just to the financial world, but society as a whole. Investment professionals are charged with making major decisions on behalf of venture capital and private equity firms, as well as managing funds invested in by corporations, governments, pension funds, endowments, foundations and non-profits.
While fields such as medicine, law and academia have become increasingly gender diverse, asset management and investing in general have remained a male bastion. In venture capital and private equity, there are virtually no women. Venture capitalists invest in risky early-stage companies or “start-ups.” When these bets hit, the rewards can be substantial but you can’t reap them if you’re not in the game. Moreover, it is difficult for women-led firms to attract investment, particularly when the investors are largely male. GWI aims to increase the number of women in asset management and finance, fields where they are highly underrepresented.
GWI demonstrates that feminist philanthropy can be a key factor in diversifying male-dominated fields such as asset management. The ripple effects of this effort are likely to go far beyond finance and investing, and empower women in a number of areas.
– Archita Sajjan