Fabbri says she has seen many practices make this mistake. “There are many generalizations about female clients that are demeaning and insulting and which assume that the 166 million women in the U.S. all think the same way.”
Haleh Moddasser, who manages $220 million for a 95% female client base at the $1.2 billion Stearns Financial Group in Chapel Hill, N.C., says she can understand why the wealthy women investors in the Spectrem study felt insulted.
“They took choice away from them, which is the same issue women investors have battled all along. Women investors complain about not being heard, about being talked over, about being told they have to invest in an aggressive portfolio. The last thing you want is to be told which advisor to choose,” says Moddasser, a partner and senior vice president with Stearns.
“At my firm, women investors don’t get steered to me because I’m a woman,” she says. “They come to me because of my expertise.”
Moddasser is also a CPA and author of two books: Gray Divorce, Silver Linings: A Woman’s Guide to Divorce After 50, and the just-published Women on Top: Women, Wealth and Social Change, an in-depth look at women’s desire for ESG investing.
“I think that women might misrepresent themselves in a study and say an advisor’s gender doesn’t matter to them, but in my experience women are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with the financial services industry, which was born and bred by men. If you look at many studies, 70% of women investors fire their husband’s advisor within 12 months of his death and 90% hire women advisors,” she says.
Two of the five partners at Stearns are women, including Moddasser, and the firm has more female advisors than male.
In sharp contrast, none of the advisors at Capital Intelligence Associates in Santa Monica, Calif., are female, “and my father and I have many more female clients than male clients,” says Mitchell Kraus, a partner in the firm.
“I think a lot of our success has to do with our comprehensive financial planning nature and that we address many of the issues that are more important to women than men in surveys,” Kraus says. “We specialize in legacy planning and I think ask more questions than most advisors.”
Melanie J. Housden, who manages $100 million at Melanie J. Financial LLC in Hamilton, Texas, and has been an advisor for two decades, says she can understand why a woman could feel insulted if a firm automatically matched her with a female advisor.