Fidelity Promotes More Women In Wake Of Misconduct Allegations

Fidelity Investments has stepped up promotions of women in its stock-picking group, which was hit last year with sexual harassment allegations.

About 30 percent of fund manager appointments in the equity unit have gone to women in 2018, the most in five years, according to an analysis by Bloomberg. Even with these moves, men still overwhelmingly dominate the money-manager ranks.

Janet Glazer, who has an MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was tapped in June for the senior leadership team that oversees the business. And Nidhi Gupta, a Harvard MBA, will exclusively preside over more than $7.8 billion in technology assets.

The stock group has been a high-profile engine of the investing giant for decades, managing north of $1 trillion across more than 350 mutual funds. Abby Johnson, who became Fidelity’s chief executive in 2014, has set out to improve the gender mix at her 72-year-old firm, if only gradually, by recruiting more women on campus and tapping talent from within. It’s a challenge faced by the entire industry, where women accounted for about 10 percent of fund managers in 2016.

A year ago Fidelity came under media scrutiny after it dismissed a prominent stock picker who had been accused of sexual harassment by a junior female employee. While the firm had named women to leadership positions and fund management roles before the misconduct allegations, the incident spurred Johnson to look even more closely at female talent for promotions. And women who moved up to bigger roles this year earned it, Fidelity spokesman Vin Loporchio said.

After the promotions, men still comprise about 86 percent of fund managers in the stock group, according to the analysis of government filings, Fidelity’s website and Morningstar Inc. data this year through October. A quarter of the unit’s 16-member leadership team are women.

“Under-representation of women in financial services roles is not isolated to Fidelity; this is an industrywide challenge,” Loporchio said. “Increasing diversity is a top priority for Fidelity, and we are making tangible progress.”

Fidelity’s stock division had a reputation in recent years for a cliquey culture. Some past appointments, primarily to males, were earned more through personal connections to powerful men than performance, according to several current and former employees of the group. Loporchio said promotions in the group were based on merit.

The harassment allegations brought the issue of the treatment of women in the unit to a head. Johnson made several moves, including relocating her office near money managers on the 11th floor of the Boston headquarters and requiring them to undergo unconscious-bias training.