The female-majority environment was critical in reaching a decision that made everyone comfortable, Caruso-FitzGerald says. “We’ve been able to tackle these difficult decisions, and we always get to consensus. There’s never this dominant voice that squashes everyone else’s viewpoint.”
There are plenty of jobs at university endowments—on the investment committees or in the funds’ offices. The committees are generally subsets of the university’s board of trustees, a combination of alumni and community members that provides strategic direction for the school’s fund. Committee responsibilities can include approving investment decisions and picking individual hedge funds and private equity firms in which to invest.
At some smaller funds, it may be a committee or two-person staff responsible for portfolio management. Larger funds have staff to manage the money, and the committee provides strategic direction.
It’s the investment office’s task to manage the endowment day to day. Unlike in many pockets of institutional investing, women are better represented in these offices than in other money-management roles. Among the 50 largest endowments, women head about a dozen, accounting for some $40 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Only one Ivy League endowment has a woman at the helm—Alice Ruth at Dartmouth.
“It’s impressed me that women are reaching the senior ranks at endowments,” says Debbie Duncan, a Wall Street veteran who’s the chair of the board of trustees at all-women Smith College and an investment committee member. This side of investing tends to have more women “than what you’d see in the mutual fund world or other institutional investors.”
That’s true despite women’s performance, which is as good or better than men’s when it comes to investing elsewhere in the financial world. Fixed-income mutual funds run by women have outperformed funds run by men since 2003, but only 14 U.S. debt funds were managed exclusively by women as of September 2017, compared with 47 in 2004, according to Morningstar Inc. The share of women running bond or equity assets has stalled for the last three years at about 1 in 10.
The pattern holds in C-suites, too. Companies where women make up at least 15 percent of senior management report 50 percent higher profitability, according to Credit Suisse Group reports. Companies that are led by a female chief executive officer have better price-to-book value and higher return on equity, Credit Suisse says. A 2017 Fidelity Investments study focusing on employee-sponsored retirement plans found that women tended to save more and performed better.
Wall Street, which is a feeder for endowment investment committees, hasn’t been a champion of promoting women to top spots. No woman has ever run a major bank. Less than one-quarter of the senior U.S. executives and managers at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc. are women. Ana Duarte-McCarthy, Citigroup’s former head of diversity, says it’s not a lack of talent but more a problem of getting women across the finish line.
University boards, especially investment committees, are often steppingstones to lucrative corporate board positions, says Betsy Berkhemer-Credaire, CEO of executive search company Berkhemer Clayton Inc. They’re essential to gaining board-related expertise and making connections, she says.
“Guys have been lining up behind each other on the golf course for 20 years,” Berkhemer-Credaire says. “University boards are a way to get in that same line.”