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When Elizabeth Weikes left a career in international diplomacy 20 years ago to become a financial advisor, she found she had to forge her own path. “I never had a female mentor,” says Weikes, who co-leads the Weikes Slattery Group, a $3.1 billion-asset Wells Fargo Advisors practice based in New York, San Diego, and Palo Alto, Calif. “There were other women who were in the business, but nobody ever took the time to connect us.”
Wealth management looks quite different today, Weikes says. Women’s mentorship networks have taken root throughout the industry, and role models have become plentiful. The question is whether those sorts of wins will be enough to lift the female portion of the advisor population above 20% or so, where it has been stuck for years. They certainly won’t hurt, but an even more important development might be the wealth management industry’s steady transition from solo practices to advisor teams, which offer a range of roles that suit different temperaments and talents. “With teams, you can step into roles that just didn’t exist before,” says Weikes.
Barron’s annual Top 100 Women Financial Advisors ranking is dominated by women who are on teams. As the teams get bigger—the average one has 15 members—and add more partners, they are becoming more horizontal in their ownership, meaning that no one person owns 65% or more of the practice. This year, 36 teams are horizontal, while 64 are vertical.
The big movers on this year’s list include two Barron’s Hall of Fame advisors: Melissa Corrado-Harrison of UBS in Denver jumped 25 spots to No. 15, while Melissa Spickler of Merrill Lynch in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., climbed 13 places to No. 24. Jana Shoulders of Mariner in Tulsa, Okla., rose 23 places to No. 30.
The typical advisor on our list manages, along with her team, around $10.5 billion of client assets, up from $7.9 billion for last year’s honorees. Annual revenue per team is nearly $20 million.
The statistics on women in wealth management are well known by now. For a decade or more, the percentage of advisors who are women has ranged from the high teens to the mid-20s, depending on the source. BlackRock, the asset management firm, puts the current number at 18%, for example, while AdvizorPro, a financial services data and intelligence platform that looks at advisor registrations, says it is about 26%.
There are signs of momentum if you look carefully. A new study by Fintrx, another wealth management data platform, shows that more younger women are entering the field. Nearly 38% of wealth management professionals ages 20 to 30 are women, Fintrx says. Many of them remain in support roles, however, including administrative, legal, compliance, and operations rather than in client-facing and revenue-generating positions. Women broadly account for only about 20% of “producing advisors,” those who work directly with clients and are responsible for generating revenue.
Meanwhile, the C-suite remains heavily male dominated, with men holding 78.5% of the industry’s top jobs; women are particularly underrepresented in CEO and chief investment officer roles, according to Fintrx.
A Gap That Matters
Aside from questions of equal opportunity, a skewed gender breakdown costs the industry a diversity of perspectives when it comes to client relationships, team decisions, and business strategy. This problem persists as more assets move into women’s hands. Through generational wealth transfer, entrepreneurship, and other means, women are increasingly becoming primary high-net-worth advisory clients.
Surveys show that many women prefer a female financial advisor and some complain that some male advisors can be condescending. This can happen in cases where the female client is knowledgeable about investing but feels a male advisor is “mansplaining.” At the same time, women who are recently widowed or divorced and don’t have investing experience may feel more comfortable working with a female advisor. The first spouse to die in couples is often the man, says Carla Wigen, president of trust services at LNW, a $12.2 billion-asset wealth advisory firm based in Seattle. “So, helping those women who maybe haven’t been as involved in their family finances is becoming more and more important,” she says.
“Our industry has to reflect our client base and our population—not just women but minorities as well,” says Shannon Reid, president of Scottsdale, Ariz.–based independent broker-dealer firm Osaic. “It’s an important and ongoing effort, and we can’t let up.”
Some wealth management firms are acing the gender diversity test. At LNW, 57% of the more than 170 employees are women, and 50% of executives are women, including CEO Kristen Bauer. The firm’s “People” page, with photos of its employees, is a big asset, says Wigen. “It’s very beneficial in recruiting and in new client acquisition,” she says.
To fill out the ranks of female advisors, those in the industry “need to be better storytellers,” says Corina Davis, who leads a $1.5 billion-asset Merrill Wealth Management practice in Seattle. The persistent misunderstanding that wealth management consists of selling investments is keeping young women away, she says.
Until the late 1990s, just about the only way into the brokerage industry was to get on the phone, start dialing, withstand countless rejections, and build a book of business one client at a time. “Many women shied away from the career because it wasn’t salary and bonus,” says Weikes. “A business where you eat what you kill isn’t for everybody.”
The reality is that the business for decades has been trending toward long-term financial planning, with investments increasingly playing a supporting role. “It’s not really a career of just understanding markets and building portfolios,” says Davis. “It’s actually about leadership and relationships, problem solving, and helping families.”
Women are well suited for the role of modern financial advisor, and vice versa, says Osaic’s Reid. “The skills some of our best advisors have include knowing how to empathize with people and talk to people,” she says. “And while being a financial advisor is sort of a 24/7 job, it’s also extremely flexible: You can go to school plays, you can go to games, you can volunteer, all those things that are important to people.”
The Team Difference
That message hasn’t been enough to attract more women to the industry. “We’ve always promoted flexibility and autonomy,” says Betsy Pakenas, who leads a Morgan Stanley practice in Frederick, Md. The shift toward teams has helped bring more women into the field, but it complicates work/life balance, she suggests. “You’re now on teams, and that means you’re accountable to others,” Pakenas says. “We need to lead with different descriptors, like ‘problem-solving,’ ‘people-facing,’ ‘fast-paced’ and ‘energetic.’ ”
Pakenas, one of the elite team leaders in the industry, entered the business in 1998, when she joined her father, a stockbroker. Her father saw the emerging shift toward financial planning but loved investments, so he asked his daughter to earn her planning designations so that “we could maintain professional relevancy and go from there,” Pakenas says.
Today Pakenas runs a team of 15 people with diverse specialties, who work together to serve each client. Pakenas says she shares “equity and opportunity” with her team, and that its members are far more collaborative than many male-led teams have historically been.
Ironically, she developed this approach because she didn’t fit in with the male branch managers and other executives who might have served as leadership role models. “When my manager was a golfer, I wouldn’t be included because I didn’t golf, and then I had a manager who was a hunter, and I wasn’t included because I didn’t hunt,” she says. “But one of the positives was that my imagination was free to roam about how I’d lead my team.”
The rise of teams has created new, less harsh ways to enter the business. That in turn has made it more friendly to women, says Weikes. “It takes a village to manage clients in the ultrahigh-net-worth space, especially when you run a family office practice,” she says. “There are many different roles on teams, instead of just one role that might not be the right fit for every female graduating from college.”
A young person looking for a marketing and communications role in the wealth management industry may now find a place on a team that didn’t exist in an earlier era. There are pure financial planning roles that don’t involve prospecting for clients. If pure business development is a candidate’s calling, those jobs exist, too.
Women can’t fix the field’s gender disparity by themselves, says Pakenas. Men make most of the hiring decisions by far, she notes. They need to hire the best candidates for each job, but a diversity of skill sets needs to be a factor in hiring decisions, she says.
Wealth management firms are also missing a golden opportunity to shape the narrative about careers in the industry because they aren’t recruiting heavily in colleges and universities, argues Weikes. “Wealth management hasn’t done a great job on the recruiting side,” she says. “When you see recruitment come through, it’s always in investment banking, it’s in sales and trading, it’s in research. It’s never in wealth management.”
Ultimately, to get more women into wealth management as advisors and leaders, the industry needs to promote more women, says Wigen. Talking about the benefits of the career will ultimately fall on deaf ears if female candidates feel they’ll be in a small minority or get stuck in administrative or client-service roles. “People have to start seeing it happen,” she says. “Just saying we’re doing it isn’t going to work.”
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