Asia leads world in women breaking into the Old Boys’ Club of portfolio management – but progress is stubbornly slow
- About one-quarter of portfolio managers are women in mainland China, Hong Kong and Singapore – versus just one in 10 in the US.
- Change requires encouraging girls to go into finance, creating family-friendly workplaces and appreciating value of diversity, experts say
The Old Boys’ Club of portfolio managers has become a bit more coed – especially in Asia. But the glass ceiling remains hard to break, even in a Me Too era that has cast a broad spotlight on women in the work world.
As International Women’s Day is celebrated today, women in mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan have made more progress in being elevated into powerful roles in the financial world than in other parts of the world, as shown in a Morningstar report.
About one in four portfolio managers – who build assets of private and institutional clients – are women in these places, versus only one in 10 in the US.
Yet, underscoring how hard it is to change this male-dominated role, the numbers have barely budged in the past decade, other than in Hong Kong.
The global average of 14 per cent of portfolio managers being women in 2009 and 2019 stayed the same. It remained essentially the same in the UK (12.7 per cent versus 13 per cent over the past decade) and the US (10.9 per cent versus 11 per cent).