It’s time to stop leaving money on the table. The data agrees.
THE
BUSINESS CASE
Only 1.4% of U.S.-based assets are managed by diverse -owned firms.
Still, women are only 14% of fund managers globally - the same level for the past 20 years.
People of color comprise just 22% of the investment industry workforce, despite being more than 40% of the US population.
Vanguard reviewed investment teams for over 2,600 US active equity funds from 2008 to 2021 and found mixed-gender funds with more than 50% women outperformed all other teams, including all-male and all-female teams, and outperformed the benchmark by 38.9 bps per year.
McKinsey’s 2018 Delivering Through Diversity Report came to a similar conclusion: gender-diverse teams are 21% more likely to see outperformance in profitability relative to peers.
WTW’s 2023 analysis found investment teams in the top quartile of gender diversity outperforming those in the bottom quartile by 45 bps per annum.
The XX Edge compiles dozens of studies showing that women at investment tables with men, reduce risk and improve returns.
A 2018 study in Harvard Business Review looked at the diversity of thousands of venture capitalists and found that if VC teams had the same ethnicities, their success rates were lower by 26.4% to 32.2%.
WTW’s 2020 analysis looked at 400 products across a number of asset classes over several years, including benchmark-relative returns and found “investment teams with diversity, in particular ethnic diversity, tend to generate better excess returns."
Women attend business school at rates similar to men, join financial services firms in entry level positions at rates higher than men, most companies have DEI plans.
In particular, African Americans only represent 5% of the investment industry workforce, despite comprising 12.4% of the US population. Hispanic/Latinx Americans only represent 8% of investment professionals, despite comprising 18.7% of the US population.
