Boosting female representation in financial advice isn’t just about fairness — it’s about better outcomes for everyone involved – teams, clients, business owners and the greater society too. Practical steps can help attract, retain, and empower women advisers.
As we celebrate this year’s International Women’s Day today and its campaign focus of #accelerateaction, Helen Howcroft (pictured), Private Client Director, Financial Planning, atomos, shares her thinking with us on just some of the measures that she believes could and would help build greater gender diversity in our profession.
Representation Drives Access
Getting more women to seek financial advice is definitely not a chicken-and-egg situation. It is causal. Get more women into the profession and you’ll get more women accessing professional advice. It is not that all women would prefer to speak to another woman, but for those that do, they are hugely underserved.
At its heart, and why it is so important, is that increasing the number of women advisers is about acting to avoid consumer harm. And it is about acknowledging that the current set-up doesn’t always meet women’s needs. And it ought to.
The Regulator’s Role
In order to make some headway in addressing the gender imbalance among advisers, and as a result greater access to advice for more women, we need to be more practical.
And that starts with the regulator itself.
More could, and should, be done by the FCA to instil confidence in the public to take advice from regulated advisers. Advice, irrespective of whether it’s given by a male or a female adviser, should lead to better outcomes. Not seeking professional advice when you have complex financial planning needs, to my mind, poses significant risk of harm and poor outcomes for consumers. Poor outcomes that are disproportionately experienced by women.
The regulator could also do more to accommodate advisers on maternity leave. Trying to cram the required 35 hours of continuous professional development (CPD), which invariably is more like 50 hours, into the hours of a phased return to work unintentionally undermines confidence on the return to work. Surely, there must be a way to determine what is necessary and practical?
Fixing the Maternity Gap
I read recently that just 18% of the profession are women (according to FCA records). So, if you have to see it to be it, we need to start seriously raising the visibility of the women already in the profession – and we need our male colleagues to amplify their voices.
Meanwhile, as employers, we need to think in terms of what practical accommodations we can make when advisers are pregnant. We lose far too many talented people in their 30s when they have children. CPD overburden plays a part, but rigidly sticking to work practices is a worse culprit. The first and third trimesters really take it out of you physically. An employer being proactive in stating the obvious – that working from home is not only fine but actively supported – would go a long way to helping advisers manage the pregnancy alongside their work.
Practical Employer Support
The same goes for flexibility around nursery and school pick-up and drop-off. Ours is a profession with work patterns and demands that can easily accommodate such flexibility. Being proactive in engaging with the adviser in those early years of having children would go a long way to ensuring far fewer left the profession shortly afterwards, because they weren’t forced to choose.
These are small, simple, practical steps but they could have a huge impact for young advisers. Retaining the role models of the future – there to service the female clients of the future.
Refreshing the Shop Window
The last obvious practical step we can take is to dress the ‘shop window’, the firm’s website, so that it doesn’t inadvertently turn women off.
‘Feminising’ website content and imagery is not about making it pink and flowery. It is about humanising it. Big city skyscrapers do not convey approachability. Ours is a people business and if you’re ‘shopping’ for the person to guide you through your financial decisions you want to get a sense of who they are. It is the impression you leave on the page that helps the prospective client decide if you might be someone they could get along with.
Building the Future of Advice
In future, we just need to do better in ensuring that our people are a far better representation of the diversity in the communities we serve. There are some practical steps we can all take now to #accelerateaction and help make that happen – when it comes to female representation at least.
