The pipeline problem: Women in financial advice

Too many women end up in financial services by accident. I’m often asked, by new starters, clients, sometimes dinner guests, how I ended up working in financial services.

I tell them the same story every time, because it’s very different to how a lot of my male counterparts entered the industry; I actually wanted to be a meteorologist.

(For context, when I was 7, a babysitter who, in a poorly-judged moment of desperation, let me and my sister watch Twister. It gave my sister nightmares. It made me obsessed with weather.)

Alas, it was not to be. I was happily told by my Maths teacher that I had scraped my ‘B’ by sheer fluke. (Oh, and that I should avoid any future career that needed a calculator.)

What followed was a Creative Writing degree and minimal job prospects. When it became clear that I was not going to write the next bestseller and paying rent was becoming more paramount, I ended up in a call centre handling mobile phone insurance claims. It was the first step in what became a successful career in financial services.

It turned out that being analytical, obsessively detail-focused, and interested in people’s stories made me a surprisingly good fit for the industry.

For many of the men I have worked with, the story was very different. Their journey often included STEM A Levels, an Economics degree, and immediate entry into financial services, frequently at paraplanner or junior adviser level. I didn’t really choose financial services. I accidentally fell into it, long after many of my male counterparts had planned their route there.

And I’m not particularly unusual.

Women Arrive by the Side Door

When writing this piece, I asked colleagues in my firm about their journeys into the profession; nearly half our staff are women, across Operations, Paraplanning, Advice, Compliance and Senior Management.

A quick skim of LinkedIn profiles showed 90% of the men had degrees related to economics, maths, or finance. Our female staff have far more varied backgrounds, from no degree at all to humanities, science, and creative subjects. Like me, most had arrived in financial services by accident.

Instead of becoming counsellors, archaeologists, teachers, (and in one case, dolphin trainer) most of us started at the very bottom, in administrative roles adjacent to finance, out of sheer necessity. A number entered much later, after career pivots or returning from breaks to raise children. Few entered because of their education, and even less of us joined at adviser or paraplanner level.  

But the reason we’ve stayed was pretty simple; we really enjoy the fact that the work we do helps real people.

Why?

Most people in financial services will agree that there’s a worrying absence of financial education in schools. It goes beyond just education however; while girls have historically been steered away from STEM subjects (see the comments from my maths teacher, for starters), a lot of women come from backgrounds where men handled the money.

We still see it, from time to time, with clients; primary responsibility for a joint investment or retirement journey stems from a male partner, with their higher pensions and next to no career gaps. Positive female role models in finance feel few and far between.  

There’s also misconceptions about the financial advice profession as a whole. There’s no requirement to be highly mathematical or investment obsessed to be successful in this industry; in fact, lived experience is probably far more helpful in helping a client establish goals and understanding their fears, than being able to explain P/E ratios or macroeconomic principles.

People hear ‘Financial Adviser’ and jump to the assumption that it’s about aggressive sales tactics, or it needs a specific degree, ignoring the fact that a large part of adviser time is spent getting to know people, better understanding what makes them tick, what they dream of, what they’re afraid of, and how best to get to what they need. In short; to listen, to coach and to solve puzzles. (Sounds a lot like counsellors, or teachers, or indeed archaeologists, to me.)

Women in Advice Are Essential

Financial planning can be a jigsaw puzzle, but it isn’t as neat as slotting the right wrapper in at the right time and manifesting the right answer. It also involves coaching people, and at times, helping clients navigate emotionally difficult situations.

It’s essential that our adviser teams understand how life changes can impact financial planning, but our female team members are an untapped resource; who better placed to advise a client considering the financial impact of maternity leave, than a female adviser who has done the very same to bring up her own family? It isn’t that male advisers don’t have this skill, but more that the reassurance offered by a positive female influence who has experienced similar makes navigating the unknown far less terrifying. When women only discover this profession later in life, the industry loses years of potential talent.

The same can be said for other vulnerabilities; financial coercion disproportionately affects women with one in six women having experienced it, according to the FCA. Surviving financial abuse is traumatic, and having to revisit this during any meeting has the potential to be re-triggering. If this abuse was at the hands of a male partner, the reassurance a female planner may bring is obvious.     

Financial advice is no longer about selling products; it is about trust. Modern regulation, including Consumer Duty, emphasises value, support, and vulnerability awareness – priorities that align closely with what many women are seeking in meaningful careers.

We are facing a talent shortage, as others retire from the industry, and we’re ignoring half the talent pool.

How do we fix it?

We might not currently have the power to change the national curriculum or shift entire generational stereotypes about women in money, but we there are easy things that we as an industry can do to attract female talent:

• Change the message – talk about helping people, not markets.
• We don’t know what we don’t know – if girls don’t know that a career in finance exists, we need to bring the career to them via more effective outreach than simply attending finance events.
• Women everywhere – women in leadership or senior roles need to visible and celebrated.
• Appropriate Support – like flexible working policies, properly established progression pathways and specific and tailored programs for those returning after a career break need to be prioritised.
• Rethinking recruitment – we don’t need an economics degree so remove the degree bias. Advertise for career switchers. Let the girls who wanted to dig up dinosaurs in!

I never became a meteorologist, but I did find a career built on analysis and problem solving. I just found it by accident!

Financial services doesn’t have a female talent problem, it has a visibility problem. Until we start telling girls that we exist, too many capable women will continue to arrive by chance instead of choice.     

By Casey Goodwin, DipPFS, Head of Client Onboarding at Path Financial