When financial advisor Nina O'Neal was a 23-year-old staff member at an investment firm in New York, she had what many women say is a rare experience in the industry: O'Neal reported a senior male executive's inappropriate behavior, and he was fired.
Then she found out from a close friend at the company that several other women had already reported the chief compliance officer's uncomfortable questions and comments when he stopped by their desks and called them to his office for unnecessary meetings, she recalled.
"I was relieved that he would no longer be a colleague, but I was shocked and disappointed that a company would keep on someone in such a position with many reports of misconduct," O'Neal, a partner with Raleigh, North Carolina-based AIM Advisors who's affiliated with the Advisor Group-owned independent brokerage Triad Advisors, said in an email.
"That was my first eye-opening experience with what my life as a female in finance would likely look like, and I promised myself that I would always speak up for myself and other women for the rest of my career," O'Neal said. "I have kept to that promise and unfortunately have had to act on it more times than I can count."
The
Some firms do stand out from their peers, though, and two of the firms with the most female advisors are owned by women: Fort Worth, Texas-based Bley Investment Group and Conway, Arkansas-based Trutoro. Bley CEO Page Pierce serves on FINRA's Board of Governors, where she and two other female executives led the way earlier this year in
Other independent wealth managers and advisors are taking action as well. Many of the largest firms already have created annual events, employee resource groups and other support for women, minority advisors and veterans among their workforces. Now, some midsize firms are stepping up. Tax-focused wealth manager Avantax is launching its Women's Advisor Forum this week, led by the firm's vice president of business development, Laurie Stack.
O'Neal
"It is a very diverse group of women who share a common narrative of hard work, passion and grit from having to put up with a lot of unfortunate biases and situations that our male counterparts have not," O'Neal said.
The industry faces an uphill climb to approach the same representation of women as the U.S. population. Many firms would first need to take the basic step of disclosing their demographics, which 25 out of 47 participants in this year's IBD Elite declined to do. That group includes some of the largest firms in the industry such as LPL Financial, Cetera Financial Group and Ameriprise. Without
For the firms that have disclosed their data, the figures offer a stark reminder of how far there is to go. Scroll down the slideshow to see which companies disclosed the largest share of women among their ranks of advisors.
To see which companies are the biggest in terms of annual revenue,
Notes: The companies are ranked below by the percentage of financial advisors who are women as of year-end 2021, as reported by the companies themselves. FP relies on each firm to state their metrics accurately. The industry term "producing registered representative" refers to each firm's most accurate count of financial advisors using the firm as their brokerage or RIA. "Registered representative" refers to a usually larger group of all licensed professionals.
