Eradicate the machismo culture and make it more attractive for women to re-enter the financial advice sector, Quilter Financial Planning’s head of acquisitions and recruitment has said.
This comes after International Adviser published a feature on how women should be helped back into the sector after a career break, as a way of tackling the adviser talent gap.
Quilter’s Scott Stevens told IA: “I think we need to make coming back to work for mums far more attractive.
“And if we did that will start to harness the power of half of the workforce. So, if you look at the graduates going into many financial services companies is 50/50.
“But if you look at the leadership positions, they are not. Why is that? That’s because the pool of talent just disappears because they go off to have children.
“We need to make the job far more attractive for them to come back. I think that is something that is incumbent on all organisations across the city of London and further afield across the UK to make it less of a machismo culture and more attractive.”
Kleinwort Hambros recently unveiled a career returners programme to get people who have taken a career break back into the sector.
Quotas
The financial services sector has been trying to create an equal playing field for a while, in a bid to get more women in industry.
There are many ways to do this, however Stevens is a big fan of one.
“It’s a personal belief but I believe in quotas, because you change the dynamics of what we’re doing,” said Stevens.
“We’re not going to get there by just trying to look at an ever-decreasing pool of ladies who aren’t attracted to the industry.”
But Stevens also mentioned the “thorny” area of positive discrimination and says at what extent do firms “start promoting ladies in business even if they’re not quite good enough to get those leadership positions”.
And he did say that more women are needed to be placed in these positions to “create role models that make them really attractive to young people to get them in the industry”.
Brown Shipley recent unveiled its Ignite network, which aims to help more women at the company to reach managerial positions.
