Good morning.
What would it take for women to increase their ranks in senior investment roles and executive committee positions?
That was the question on the table at yesterday’s 100 Women in Finance Global FundWomen Week conference in New York City, which aimed to connect female fund managers with institutional allocators.
Gains for women in alternatives, which includes hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital, have inched along. Female employment in alternatives rose marginally last year to 21.3%, up from 20.9% in 2021, according to Preqin’s Women in Alternatives 2023 report. Women accounted for 32.5% of junior level positions in alternatives but only held 13.6% of senior level positions, Preqin said. Women accounted for 10.3% of board membership among fund managers and 14.2% of investors.
Christopher Ailman, chief investment officer of the California State Teachers' Retirement System, or CalSTRS delivered the opening keynote. He offered an anecdote where he recalled speaking to a very successful female executive on Wall Street in the 1980s. In the 1980s, this woman admitted to Ailmen that when she climbed the ladder on Wall Street, if she saw another woman in the room, she considered them her competition. This woman thought her job was to beat the other women because there were only a few spots for them, he said.
“And I'm just like, no, that can't be right. If you climb the ladder, the first thing you have to do is turn around and put your hand back down and pull somebody else up. You've got to network together,” Ailman told a crowd filled with fund managers and investors, who were nearly all female. Ailman added that he was passionate about pushing diversity, particularly women. “You’re half the population,” he said.
But in 2023 there is certainly a sense that women are helping women, and the gatekeepers to capital are the ones who could extend a hand. Some well-known female executives who attended the 100 Women event Thursday include Ivelina Green, founder and CIO, Pearlstone Alternative; Sherrese Clarke Soares, founder and CEO, HarbourView Equity Partners; and Nancy Davis, founder and CIO, Quadratic Capital Management.
Sachee Trivedi, founder and director of Trident Capital Investments, an India-focused private equity firm, pointed to the more than $80 trillion under management in the U.S. (the $80 trillion represents the money managed by pension funds, family offices, foundations and endowments), according to a Knight Diversity of Asset Managers study from December 2022. Nearly all, or 98.6%, of the more than $80 trillion is managed by white men. “I think that number is wrong. Should that number be more 50-50 between white men and everybody else? I do not know, but as an engineer I can tell you that number is wrong,” Trivedi said on the sidelines of the conference.
Trivedi has two engineering degrees and is the former global equity fund manager for Columbia Threadneedle Investments EMEA & APAC. She said she believes in meritocracy. Trident, her firm, is currently out fundraising. “I don’t need anyone’s charity to allocate money to me. But you raise the bar, you put the bar [in front of me] and I'm going to cross it,” Trivedi said.
In any other industry, women or people of color are not denied raw material, Trivedi said. If she wanted to set up a petroleum company or a real estate business, she could get the land or the product, she said. “For the asset management industry, the fund is the raw material. Are we denied? We are denied because 98.6% of the raw material is with the white male,” she said.
Have a great weekend,
Luisa Beltran
Twitter: @LuisaRBeltran
Email: luisa.beltran@fortune.com
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