The turbo-capitalist guide to equal opportunities
In my industry, gender parity is modest. According to a study by Citywire (LINK), the share of women in German fund management recently stood at 6%. If you are looking for even lower quotas, you will probably find them among roofers and road builders (LINK).
Personally, unequal treatment, whether of animals or humans, bothers me - that's how I‘m wired. For anyone who doesn't have time for “altruistic nonsense”, I have two stone-cold, capitalist reasons for the advancement of women:
Competitiveness
The laws of competition are changing rapidly. Entrenched market positions and economic moats are being undermined with increasing frequency. Protection through patents or access to certain physical resources is no longer sufficient. In the long term, the winners will be those who can retain the best employees and offer them an agile working environment. Investment banks are currently in a peak phase of the "War for Talents". The focus is on the blunt method of outbidding each other with higher fixed salaries. This is subject to diminishing marginal utility. The easiest way to increase the recruiting funnel is to put a big focus on female applicants and employees. Those who manage to get the ball rolling will enjoy a snowball effect. After all, a larger female workforce, especially in management positions, signals many non-monetary benefits such as flexible work models and more humane working conditions. This, in turn, is likely to attract more female applicants. Furthermore, having a more balanced gender ratio within a company will certainly not negatively impact male applicant numbers either. Would "Chad" rather work at an investment bank with a 10% or 30% female quota?
Investment alpha
In the field of active fund management, people like to point out that they stringently select the most attractive risk-return constellations among all investment opportunities. Nevertheless, the research focus is subject to considerable distortions of interest. One analyst prefers to deal with machines, and the other with software. Between analyst and female analyst, distortions of interest should be even more apparent. With the low quota of women in fund management, this leads to certain industries and business models unconsciously receiving systematically too little attention in the research process. The unprecedented concentration of capital in the public markets on a few large companies is probably also related to this, in addition to the influence of ETFs. Those who see this concentration as a risk should work to increase the proportion of women in portfolio management. It can also be assumed that more and more financial market participants will take up the cause of promoting women. So if you act quickly now, you can do something for your alpha in addition to risk management by bringing the female perspective on board as early as possible.
If you are interested in some exciting data points on these theses, you can take a look at a study by the RKW Competence Center from Eschborn (LINK). Owner-managed companies have significantly higher quotas of women on the first and second management levels. They must be thinking long term...
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