A new study has found that women advisors starting out in their careers are at a disadvantatge compared with men when it comes to getting help from mentors.
A study published by King of Prussia, Pa.- based American College Center for Women in Financial Services highlighted areas where financial advisors said they need more assistance to be successful. The center surveyed 800 financial advisors and asked them to define their level of success and the factors that led to it.
About 60% of respondents said the reason they became advisors was to help people.
Meanwhile, the survey found men and women have different perceptions of what makes them successful. Men attributed their success to individual skills such as hard work and individual effort while women put more of an emphasis on other factors, including their marketing team, community support and good communication with their clients, the center said.
The study also found that women don't have as many mentors available to them as men do.
“Historically, men have been able to find mentors much more easily than women in natural networking situations that they employed over the years,” said Hilary Fiorella,” director of the Center for Woman in Financial Services. “Women are normally outside these arrangements.”
These mentoring situations include golf outings or meeting with co-workers after work for drinks. Women do not always take advantage of these situations or they are not invited to them, the study found.
More than 83% of women surveyed described themselves as successful without ever having had a mentor compared with 54% of men. Fiorella noted that all advisors who considered themselves successful gave credit to a mentor, while those who were not succesful said they could stand to benefit from having a mentor.
Based on these results, she sees an opportunity for firms to provide a much-needed service for their advisors.
“Firms should take advantage and put in place mentoring opportunities for men and women that will help them learn the ropes [and] bounce things off of,” Fiorella said. “It just seems like a very easy slam dunk kind of thing that firms should take advantage of.”