Progress on hiring more female fund managers ‘is patchy’

The asset management industry has made progress with efforts to achieve gender parity, but its push for diversity has been held back by new mandates being awarded overwhelmingly to men, it has been claimed.
An annual report on diversity in the sector has warned that appointments on new fund launches“still pull in the wrong direction”, despite progress in other areas.
The percentage of funds managed by women has increased from 12.1 per cent to 12.5 per cent in 2024, according to a database analysis by Citywire, a media group that covers the industry. The average size of portfolios run by women increased from £320 million to £383 million.
Vanguard, one of the largest asset managers in the world, now has female portfolio managers running funds totalling £13.1 billion, with men running a total of £11.1 billion.
However, Citywire’s analysis revealed more than 80 per cent of new launches were still awarded to men, suggesting that there were too few women in fund managers’ candidate pools and that women had not been able to build their experience levels to the same extent as their male peers. Launch appointments are regarded as key because they are some of the most high-profile posts, capable of bolstering an individual’s career.
The analysis found that the difference in turnover rates between men and women was “stubbornly high”. The average rate of turnover for women managing portfolios was 43 per cent, compared with 29 per cent for men, measured over ten years.
“When the pandemic led to the proliferation of flexible working, firms hailed their policies as an inclusive measure that would keep women in the workplace,” Nicola Blackburn, Citywire’s chief reporter, wrote in the report. “However, four years on, just as many female portfolio managers are leaving or changing their roles.”
Bixuan Xu, a global equity fund manager at Royal London Asset Management, said that progress for women in the sector “comes and goes”. She founded Chinese Women in the City to support women of Chinese heritage working in the financial and technology industries in the UK and recently hired two women to her team.
“It is quite dependent on whether you have quite a lot of senior women within a firm,” she said. “There is definitely more awareness of hiring women and hiring women at a junior level and helping women to progress, but it’s quite patchy because there are too few senior women at the higher levels. If one person moves to a different firm or retires, you lose a key supporter of representation. It’s fragile.”
Xu said she often had a different view of what made a good candidate for a role from her male counterparts. “A female candidate can be very quiet in a group interview, but as a woman I will pay attention to what she says, rather than how much she is saying. And people often may not notice that what she says is incredibly high-quality.
“Men will also think of themselves as a future portfolio manager and they will present themselves in that manner. But if you are hiring a woman to work as an analyst, she will only think of herself as an analyst. I went through those phases myself, so I recognise them and can see a woman’s real potential.”
Amanda Yeaman, a fund manager at Abrdn, said more women were able to progress in asset management thanks to an improvement in the work-life balance available to professionals. At one stage in her career, Yeaman was waking up at 5.30am and would not return home until late at night. Now, she said, the industry was able to offer employees more time for family commitments, which had helped to support women in their careers.
Yeaman worked as an equity sales specialist for small and medium-sized companies on the securities team at Investec before joining Abrdn in 2019. Today she provides research informing Abrdn’s work on smaller companies in Britain.
She was named as one of the top female managers for UK funds by Morningstar this year alongside Abby Glennie, her colleague. Yeaman and Glennie run an investment trust with a board mainly composed of women and their global smaller companies team also employs more women than men.
“Ten years ago, the women in this industry were few and far between,” Yeaman said. “I reckon progress has been slow, but we have made real progress with hiring women. There is always more to do, but these things do take time. I think more women are in the industry now because it’s more flexible than it was in the past, which is true of a lot of industries. I have two young children and I really value flexibility.
“We’ve also got lots of really great women in the portfolio companies that we hold. It doesn’t feel like that was the case ten years ago.”