Richard Klipin
Membership statistics from the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) point to a surge in young women embracing financial planning as a career.
Executive director Richard Klipin said that “a lot” of younger female advisers have been joining the AFA over the past two years, which he attributes partly to its recently launched GenX program.
He said this trend is reflected in the growing representation of women in the AFA Awards program, most notably in the Rising Star of the Year award — now in its fourth year.
“We’re currently doing the judging for this year’s Rising Star award — scheduled to be announced next month — and there are a lot of nominees and a lot of women among them.
“We’ve had 32 nominations for the 2008 award and about 34 per cent of them are women, representing the high point of two years of strong female growth in their representation.”
These stats are “indicative of a better overall gender balance in new entrants to financial planning as a result of the profession becoming increasingly attractive to women”, he said.
“As professionalism and education levels rise in the sector, a lot of women are choosing advice as a career — although overall, it has to be said, females in the sector are still relatively few.”
Sarah Wapling, principal consultant of Link Recruitment’s wealth management division, agrees there “are a greater number of female entrants to the sector, particularly at the paraplanner and associate adviser level”.
“About 30 or 40 per cent of the younger or less experienced candidates for our advertised jobs are women, although this falls to about 20 per cent when we get to the adviser level.”
The trend is being driven both by young women increasingly choosing to be advisers and by strong encouragement to do so from the sector, she said.
“The industry has realised women actually do financial planning very well, tending to be more empathetic towards clients than men when they sit down with clients to go through their assets and liabilities,” she said.
