Progress in increasing the number of women in fund management has ground to a halt – an uncomfortable fact for the asset management industry that Citywire’s 2022 Alpha Female Report has just laid bare. However, Citywire Amplify can also reveal who some of the very best women equities managers are, and where they work.

The Equities Elite list is composed of 421 names, a fraction of the total 10,000 equity fund managers tracked by Citywire. The list is a data calculation and the methodology can be found below. Of these managers, 42 are women: 10%. That is a little below the global manager average (in all sectors it is 12%; within equities it is also 12%).

Click here to view the full group data on female manager percentages, tenure, turnover and mixed teams.

Amplify has spoken to those women who run top-performing portfolios about their experiences. But first, here are the 42 women in the Equities Elite, and the groups they work for.

Barings was one of four groups to contribute more than one manager apiece to Citywire’s Equities Elite list: AAA-rated Nicola Lai and A-rated Eunice Hong.

‘Shortly after starting at Barings, I got married and started a family. Juggling family life and developing my career was extremely challenging – especially when telling myself I had to be the perfect wife, mother and fund manager all at once,’ Hong tells Amplify.

‘I soon learnt how to strike a balance between the different parts of my life and that you can’t be everything to everyone at the same time. My son knows I will be there for him, but I’m also a believer that I’m setting him a good example by working hard and being ambitious in my career,’ Hong says. She manages three funds for Barings: Asia Growth, Eastern Trust and Korea Trust.

Lai (pictured) is responsible for the $1.4bn Barings Hong Kong China fund, and the Barings China A Share fund. ‘It wasn’t always easy,’ Lai says, of moving from managing her fund as a young single woman to a wife and mother of three boys.

‘But I’m so grateful to work in a supportive company where there are female mentors who have faced similar challenges, demonstrating that it is possible to thrive as an investor and mother all at the same time.’

Allianz Global Investors also contributes two women managers to the list, including an outright star performer.

As well as being part of the elite list, Corrina (Hui Chung) Xiao, features as the most consistently outperforming female fund manager in the 2022 Alpha Female Report, spending 73 months with the top AAA rating. Xiao (pictured below) has also found it challenging to juggle work and life commitments.

‘No matter if you are a man or a woman, you should work very hard. Whether young or old, we should always keep an open mind. We should be very humble and keep learning, and it’s normal to face difficulties. But don’t give up on your dreams,’ she says.

Xiao manages the Allianz Global Investors Taiwan fund, which has returned 76% over three years. Read her interview with Amplify here.

Good for equality, good for business

Businesses like to talk about cognitive diversity: the idea that people with different backgrounds, and different ways of thinking, improve outcomes and create resilience.

When it comes to gender, fund selectors share this view – that diverse teams generally produce better investment results. Citywire’s Alpha Female research backs this up.

Looking at the total return generated per unit of risk, over three years, mixed teams performed better than funds managed by just one manager.

For every unit of risk a mixed team took, 1.07% in returns was generated, compared with solo male managers’ return of 0.86% and solo female managers’ return of 0.8%. Find out more about mixed team use and performance in the report.

‘Given the male dominance in the industry, being a woman by default adds to the diversity of thought and perspective to the industry,’ says Barings’ Lai. ‘Equity investing, or picking the right stock, involves deciphering through and analysing a large amount of information, and then synthesising that information into a decision. It is both a science and an art, which incorporates a much wider skillset than most people appreciate.’

Elite manager Sara Moreno had a diverse upbringing: she grew up in Ecuador, Nigeria and Trinidad and Tobago. She believes it helped her realise what she could bring to the table as an emerging market portfolio manager.

‘My background meant I could take into account cultural nuances that may play a factor in a company’s performance. This insight allowed me to delve deeper into a company’s profile by having an understanding of local context. As an emerging market investor, understanding these economies from lived experiences allows one to bring a unique thought process to investment decisions.’

Moreno (pictured) co-manages the PGIM Jennison Emerging Markets Equity and PGIM Jennison Emerging Markets Equity Opportunities funds alongside Mark Baribeau and Albert Kwok. Moreno has been consistently rated by Citywire since August 2019 and currently holds an A rating.

Groups will often complain that the low number of women coming into fund manager roles starts with a low number of female applicants. Some managers Amplify spoke to believed the low proportion of women with an educational background in mathematics and science was partly to blame for that.

At first glance, Moreno provides evidence against that, as she did not come from a numbers background at all. But she admits the path to a fund manager career was not obvious.

‘After studying liberal arts, where my interest in investment was piqued when I joined an investment club, I joined an economic consulting firm and then became a sell-side analyst, which later led me to fund management. I would say that my college self wouldn’t have thought that the asset management industry was for her. I now know differently.’

Back at Barings, every equity fund is co-led. This policy has helped to put the firm in the top 10 for female manager representation at companies with 50-100 managers (23%).

Ghadir Cooper is the head of global equities at Barings, and an executive sponsor of its women’s group. She says there is no policy of deliberately adding women to teams, but rather that their presence is a payoff from other policies: ‘attract, engage, develop and retain’.

‘Most of the talent that comes through the door is very deliberate in the way that we attract it,’ says Cooper (pictured below). ‘We go to good universities, but not necessarily all of the universities that you would. We’ve got people who come to us from all over the place, and then they embed with us.’

“‘Why is it good for women to come and work in the asset management business? You have to have enough mentors, which we’re trying to do, from A levels, etc. Enough outreach to society. We also need to have enough people that look like leaders, that people can identify with, that got to be heads of team, fund managers, on senior leadership teams out there. I don’t think we [the industry] do enough of that.”