Now, the allegations of sexual harassment at Fidelity may make it harder for Johnson to accomplish one of her key goals: recruiting more female employees. Johnson is the first woman to run Boston-based Fidelity, which is controlled by her family and manages $2.3 trillion. She is one of the fund industry’s rare women CEOs and the only female speaker featured solo at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association conference Tuesday, according to the program on Sifma’s website. 

“We have a real need in our business right now to recruit more women,” Johnson said in an interview last month for “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” on Bloomberg Television. When women come into Fidelity branches, “very often, the first thing they say when we’re trying to get them paired up with a rep is, ‘I’d like to work with a woman.”’

In her speech, which focused on the importance of financial services companies embracing digital technologies, Johnson also said recruiting was a key challenge.

“Attracting the next generation of talented young associates is an extremely important issue for me and Fidelity’s senior leadership team,” Johnson said.

Recruiting Issues

John said that “artificial intelligence and machine learning will be two of the important technologies that will impact the financial services industry over the next decade.” She added: “And a key part of this is attracting younger workers not only as customers, but also as employees.”

Women have historically been underrepresented in the asset-management industry. They’ve made up about 10 percent of fund managers in the U.S., compared with 36 percent of lawyers and 33 percent of doctors, according to Morningstar Inc. research published last year.

Fidelity and other money managers may face a flood of complaints “now that the lid is off,” said Davia Temin, president and CEO of Temin & Co., a New York based crisis-management company.

Going forward, Johnson has to continue to “set the tone” that the organization will take every case that comes to light seriously and emphasize there’s also a business case for doing so, said Temin. While Fidelity is a closely held company without public shareholders, its customer base cares about these issues, she said. Some public pension funds already demand that women be included on teams that manage their money.

Weinstein Fallout