Out of 562 new fund launches over the past 12 months, only around 10% went to female fund managers, according to Citywire’s Alpha Female Report 2022.

The lack of new vehicles being entrusted to female fund managers is surprising at a time when firms both want to reach into new areas, encourage new talent and broaden the diversity of thought being put to use.

• Read the full Alpha Female 2022 report here

Citywire Selector spoke to several members of the most recent 40 Under 40, which covers Europe’s rising crop of pan-European fund selectors, to see how they approach issues around representation when looking at new launches.

What they look for

Working from a small sample of the 40 names, a handful said they are conscious of the gender make-up of a team when looking for new ideas. A number said they would actively assess the gender of the fund manager when researching prospective funds.

This is while others said it was a minor consideration but not something overt in their work. Another selector mentioned it was usually involved at the qualitative stage, but only after the fund had been viewed quantitatively, which did not consider such factors.

Almost all of the next-gen selectors approached agreed with the idea that having a mixed-gender team would provide better outcomes for a strategy. This is while a smaller number believed it was only partially important or, in one case, unlikely to have any major bearing on performance.

Those selectors in the 2021/22 class were asked to guess what percentage of new strategies were handed to sole female fund managers and all respondents correctly guessed it was below 25% of new launches over the past year. However, there was a sense of shock that the number was as low as 10%.

The road to repair

But, how can asset managers actively address this? Priyanka Rurprecht, who sits within the fund selection team at Julius Baer, believes a greater awareness of how women can adapt to both work and extracurricular demands.

‘I think if we want to encourage talented women to run funds we need to create an environment that allows women to combine family and work. It has to be possible to carry out jobs with great responsibility on a part time basis,’ she said.

Anecdotally there has been a sense that women are handed portfolios in niche or smaller areas, which allows them to build up expertise and their track record over time before being entrusted with larger strategies. However, fund buyers pushed back against this conceit.

Almudena Cansado, fund analyst at Santander Private Banking, said: ‘Personally, I don’t expect a higher representation of female fund managers in some specific sectors, although it seems to me is easier to find woman involved in the management of sustainable or impact funds than in “conventional” ones.’

This was also suggested by Yong Lin of Achmea in the Netherlands. ‘I believe there are more female fund managers in the impact investment sector or investments related to sustainability.

‘There can be several reasons for,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to generalise all female fund managers in this industry, but, if I have to name some reasons, it could be that women have a greater tendency to be empathic, thus a stronger ethic of care and want to contribute to a better world.’

The idea that women are being drawn towards more sustainable areas was echoed by Sofie Geukens, who is head of investment solutions and fund selection at Belfius.

‘Based on observations in my environment I notice that female investment specialist do have more of a focus on sustainable strategies, so perhaps there will be a higher number of female managers in this space.’

However, Geukens stressed that female fund managers should not be actively pushed into thematic areas but given the same opportunities as men when it comes to new ideas.

Kleinwort Hambros’ Kalinka Dynakova was among those to offer a strong view that the idea of siloing female talent in niche sectors, as well as not being willing to hand new funds to female fund managers, would be detrimental to the industry as a whole.

‘It is true that in the fixed income, there are predominance of male leaders, while sustainable and ESG solutions have an important portion of female leaders. Consumer-related funds are also mainly managed by women, but as human beings we are all different and there are good female leaders in all fields.’

Looking ahead, Deepti Jaju, who serves as a senior fund analyst at Pictet, is hopeful that representation will improve, which may come to the fore in the shape of mixed-gender teams.

‘Going forward, I would expect more female fund managers and mixed teams across investment sectors. With increasing consideration given to gender diversity and inclusion in qualitative assessment of asset managers, the industry has realised the extent of the under representation of women in senior investment roles despite having the requisite skills.

‘It is a slow grind, but I am hoping to meet more female fund managers as the asset management industry evolves,’ she said.

‘It can’t happen overnight’: Where female PMs stand

Citywire AA-rated Paola Binns was a prominent voice in the 2018 iteration of the Alpha Female report.

Speaking at that time, Binns, who runs corporate bond portfolios at Royal London Asset Management, said the idea that simply switching to mixed-gender investment teams would be an oversimplification.

This is because team dynamics can vary so wildly between organisations. Binns said a lot of the diversity she had witnessed at her employer had been organic rather than formally mandated.

With little progress between the time she made the comments in 2018 and now – as the number of female fund managers grew by only 1.7 percentage points in four years – what does Binns make of this minimal progress?

‘Because of Covid and hybrid working it’s actually quite hard to gauge how much things have changed in the industry,’ she told Citywire Selector via email. ‘However, there has been a push on recruitment to attract a more diverse work force at Royal London.

‘We have seen this in particular with our Intern programme where we used Her Capital. There are many more female faces around in the firm but getting a broader and more diverse set of people in senior roles is the biggest challenge for the industry as a whole.

‘You need experience to take on more responsible roles so realistically it cannot happen overnight. New talent needs to be nurtured so that over time the change will be more obvious.’