A more diverse and inclusive financial planning profession is something to aspire to – but a series of interviews with women working in advice suggests we’re not there yet.

Diversity, and particularly gender diversity, is something that is talked about a lot in financial planning circles.

There is the high level concept of diversity that gets discussed and pondered at conferences. But there can sometimes be a gap between the positive messaging we hear on the conference floor and women’s individual, on the ground experiences.

Getting more women into the profession is a subject close to Sam Secomb’s heart – so much so that she set up a business, Women’s Wealth, to deliver on that purpose. She also devoted her recent executive MBA at Warwick Business School to understanding more about how women are interacting with advice and planning from an employee perspective.

The result, Women’s career progression in the UK financial planning sector, was published by the Personal Financial Society last month.

Sam says: “As part of the MBA, I had to dedicate 900 hours to a dissertation. I thought: ‘Right, if I've got to do this, I've got to make it count.’

"I understood that what Women’s Wealth meant to me was a business that was attractive to female financial planners. Everything in my psyche was like: What does that look like? How does that work? What does the business need to do and not do to be an attractive place for female financial planners to work? So that was the motivation for it.

“I wanted to talk to women who hadn't been able to transition into advice, those who could do the work of an adviser but didn't want to for one reason or another, or those who did want to be an adviser but couldn't find a way of fitting it into their lives.”

The findings: What women said

With support from the PFS, Sam carried out 15 in-depth interviews with women working in roles such as paraplanning, compliance, admin, management and training. They were asked about their careers and lives in general, as well as issues such as the perception of women in advice and their own attitudes and priorities.

Here’s some of what they had to say.

“I basically feel that because I was married, and I was of childbearing age, I think that held me back quite a bit from promotion and stuff like that, and nobody will say it, but we all think it. We don’t want to take on somebody’s who’s going to go on maternity. Because what do we do? I think that’s always in the back of your mind when you hire a woman.”

One interviewee explained how a firm she worked in encouraged male recruits to become advisers, but not female staff.

“…every male candidate was told that he could become an adviser. But women were constantly being told that the best they could do is probably to be a paraplanner if they try hard. That happened all the time. And it was so, so wrong.

“I think we probably were all conditioned somewhere there in the background, without even realising that, you know, the furthest we can go is to be a paraplanner. If we’re lucky.”

Another interviewee described a decision to move from compliance to going for a sales management role. She worked hard to secure the promotion, taking on big projects and negotiating for her results to be recognised. She also intentionally informed the business her husband was happy to be the main caregiver for their son.

She added:

“But you know what? I’d have got that job sooner if I’d been a man.”

One woman reported feeling bullied in a male-dominated firm with aggressive sales targets, and another said women were effectively being relegated to work in the small client team because they worked part-time. She said:

“You can’t look after bigger clients and be part-time. That’s the rule they have.”

In another case, an interviewee said she felt at a disadvantage by being a woman and having to balance work and home/family life. She said:

“I’ve never had anyone strong enough at home to be doing that for me. To allow me to go and do that other role. I’ve always had to do the two, marry the two up together. So I think if I was a man it definitely would’ve been easier. Definitely.”

And finally, Sam heard how a gender pay gap issue came to light, and how it had to be disputed to be resolved:

“There was a point in my career where we had a male join the team and he came in just above me and my friend, who were both kind of on a similar level. But we basically trained him. And so we knew all of his stuff, what he was doing, and he got paid significantly more than us.

“I’m somebody who would just put up and shut up, but my friend isn’t. So she brought it up saying this is a gender thing, and then we both got given pay rises [a] couple of years ago. Now, since then, they’ve put in a pay structure which does not discriminate at all. It’s all in our contracts. It’s basically based on job, role and exams.”

The industry and the profession

The interviews were carried out in the first year of lockdown, in the summer of 2020.

Sam says a lot of the women she spoke to were surprised at how well they could work from home, and that they were largely able to create the space and boundaries they needed to get their work done.

She says this attitude fed through to their employers, who realised that staff could still be productive in a home-working environment.

But Sam believes there is still a problem in some more traditional advice firms, which operate a culture geared around product sales.

Sam Secomb, Women's Wealth

She says: “It sounds old hat but it's true. There are still companies run by people who were trained like I was, in a traditional sales environment. We all know you're not allowed to cold call and knock on people's doors and all of that stuff anymore. Financial services is delivered to the consumer differently now. But we still want to measure it like we used to.”

Sam points out the financial planning profession is becoming much more distinct from the product-led financial services industry. She’d like to see this difference explained much more clearly, both to would-be new entrants and consumers.

“Financial planning is still a very young profession. And for all the financial planners that I know, and the women I spoke to, their entry point was through the industry. So how do we create entry points into the profession, instead of trying to bring people through the industry and then moving them into the profession?”

She says at the moment a consumer can still seek out a chartered financial planner and end up with a salesman from the bank, and not realise that’s what they’ve done.

Getting to greater diversity

Sam is hopeful that in time we will see more women coming into advice and a more diverse profession generally.

“I think we've got a shortage of advisers. And I think we've got women who are under-utilised as advisers. I'm hoping that those two forces are going to promote a situation where companies are going to have to work out how to leverage these women and their capabilities, and their availability to service clients.”

She says there is an “army of women” out there within advice already, often working in paraplanning roles. Not all of those will want to become advisers, but Sam believes there are ways to show women how rewarding a career in the financial planning profession overall can be.

What she found from her conversations was women who were keen to develop professionally year-on-year, and to take exams to build their technical knowledge and their confidence.

They like to work in a collaborative environment, as opposed to the old days where advisers would guard the names on their client lists.

Sam says a positive advice workplace is one that provides women with a sense of belonging, with a clear career track, and the space to build client relationships. No doubt a formula that would appeal to men too.

“I came across some fantastic research that talked about women’s careers being like kaleidoscopes, with all their changing patterns. As kids grow up, some women can get to a stage in their life where what they’ve given a lot of their life to doesn’t need them as much anymore.

"All of a sudden, you've got these super switched on women with loads of energy, life experience and qualifications. If you could ramp them back into the workplace, they are some serious resources.”

Sam would like to see more women coming into financial planning as a second or third career. She’s also keen to encourage more women into business, such as paraplanners with huge amounts of technical skill and expertise who could set up on their own.

“Not all women want to be career women. But what matters is that the women who do want careers can have them in a way that doesn’t require them to be frowned on as a mother, or somehow seen as less of a woman. Why can’t she have that? Why aren’t those opportunities there?

“If we can nurture women into the profession and into business, we can let them know they don’t have to know it all right at the start, but can grow and develop into their roles. We can give them the opportunities to better themselves, and reward them for doing so.

"Why can’t we nurture and celebrate those characteristics? I think those are fantastic traits for a business to have in a workforce.”

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This is one perspective, but there are positive stories to be shared too. The Women in Financial Advice Awards looks to celebrate and recognise women in a sector where they are still under-represented. You can find out more about the event and this year's finalists here