10.28.20
A Financial Services Diversity Action Plan
by: John Manganaro
As of 2017, just 19 percent of advisors in the United States were women, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows. At the same time, even though African Americans made up about 13 percent of the United States population, the Bureau reported they accounted for only about 7.6 percent of financial services professionals. A new white paper published by Willis Towers Watson (WTW) adds to this important, ongoing discussion. “In our view, an ideal asset manager has optimal cognitive diversity, where we define cognitive diversity as the inclusion of people who have different ways of thinking, different viewpoints and different skill sets in a team,” the paper says. “Cognitive diversity is hard to measure, but it is heavily influenced by quantitative metrics of diversity that we can collect. We therefore assess diversity across gender and ethnicity, and endeavor to assess the deeper and more nuanced aspects in our manager research process.” As the WTW paper explains, the actual process of measuring these metrics will vary depending on the investment manager being considered, but there are some common points of analysis.
Read the full article on PlanAdviser.com.