Can New Initiatives Put Women In The Advisor Pipeline?

Raymond James’s initiative is more focused on advisors, said Lynch. In addition to targeting college programs, the firm is also appealing to women in later stages of their lives.

“We’ve made a concerted effort on targeting women who are interested in making a career change and letting them know about the financial advisor role and how well suited women are for the profession,” said Lynch, also commenting that the company is trying to promote women internally from support roles to advisory roles and support its young woman advisors through mentoring and professional development.

To this point, women’s initiatives have had more success in facilitating client engagement than they have in expanding the pipeline of women into the industry.

Each of the women’s initiatives discussed on Wednesday were started by a woman advisor who wanted to create more visibility for her cohorts and female clients. The panelists agreed that a general lack of visible female role models and mentors in the industry drives a lot of client and advisor attrition.

Moderator Jocelyn Wright, the State Farm chair in women and financial services at the American College of Financial Services, pointed out that women cannot create a more equitable industry on their own. As more woman advisors seek to create similar initiatives within their firms, they will have to seek and encourage assistance from male allies.

“There’s such a small percentage of advisors who are women, so we need men who are leaders to stand up and say that this is really important,” said Wright.

In the panelists’ cases, male leaders at their firms were not only receptive to starting a women’s initiative, but were often supportive and enthusiastic.

Wright pointed out that this wasn’t necessarily indicative of a zeal for gender equality or social justice.

“There’s a new term called ‘womenomics’ that describes the economic power that women are attaining and how that’s disrupting the status quo,” said Wright. “Women control over 51 percent of the wealth in the U.S. By 2020, that is expected to grow to 67 percent, or $22 trillion. There’s a business case as to why we need a women’s initiative.”

Just two years, or less, into their programs, Massey Quick and Plancorp are already seeing an increase in engagement among their women clients, said Salvo and Gelsheimer.