AJ: I’m still young. I’m not that old. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s too early to tell.
BM: When you said about half of Fidelity’s new hires in branches are women, was that a goal that was set out?
KM: It’s not a quota. What we wanted to do was increase diversity in general in our branches, really to serve our customers more broadly. We serve millions and millions of women, both through the workplace and through personal investing. There’s definitely a confidence gap that women have in investing.
We’re in the midst of a $22 trillion shift in assets to women, because of longevity, because they’ll outlive their spouse, because of divorce, whatever. Second, and related, 9 out of 10 women will be the sole decision-maker in their household on their finances at some point in their life, either due to the death of the spouse, divorce, or because they stayed single over the course of their career.
If 90 percent of women have to have some understanding of finances and feel confident about it, how can we help women investors get the confidence? We know women are absolutely just as good as men at investing when they actually take the step. We’ve proven that, and they’re actually slightly better. So we’ve got a major effort in the workplace business as well as in the retail business of helping women feel more confident: educational campaigns, seminars, etc.
You see so many examples of women not feeling confident, not making the moves early. They save, but they don’t invest. If you save and just put it in the bank account, and then they wake up and they’re 55 and they say, “Oh, my God, what am I going to do?”
AJ: We’ve got a group that’s dedicated to studying what those subtle differences and preferences might be and working them back into our program. Kathy runs a very controlled process. Everybody follows the Fidelity program, so we get that information out so it’s exercised consistently.
KM: For example, we have a policy in our branches of—we don’t mandate it, because it’s up to the customer ultimately—having both spouses come to planning meetings. Men and women in general learn differently and express their goals differently. Women don’t feel confident investing until they know a lot. Men are much more comfortable learning as they go. All the technical terms in financial services—alpha, beta—are a complete turnoff to women. So we’ve revamped how we talk about financial services.
Men talk about short-term performance, how they’re doing lately. Women talk about family goals over a much longer period of time. You have to know these things in order to have the right kind of conversations.
AJ: We redesigned our branches so that they would be a little more friendly. Hingham [a branch in Massachusetts] was our prototype for the new design. We had gotten feedback that our branches were too corporate. The same people who did our offices did the branches, so I guess it wasn’t that surprising. It’s just that no one ever stopped to think about it.