Despite rising awareness of DEI issues, change is slow to occur

Awareness is up, but momentum remains low as the financial advisory and asset management ecosystem address the chronic underrepresentation of women, ethnic minorities and LGBTQ individuals in the industry.

And the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards Inc. faces the daunting challenge of replacing Kate Healy, who is set to depart shortly from her position as managing director of its Center for Financial Planning. Healy has been a leading voice in elevating the urgency of diversity for the profession and within financial services.

Women’s presence in the advisory profession is stalled at 23.6%, according to CFP Board data released in January, even though nearly 30% of new CFPs are women. The same pattern holds for ethnic minorities: While underrepresented ethnicities make up about 15% of new CFPs each year, the new arrivals barely moves each group’s overall presence in the profession, with Hispanics currently representing 2.9% of all CFPs; Black people, 1.9%; Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, 4.1%; Native Americans, 0.2%; and multiracial CFPs, 0.1%.

Driven by the business imperative that the profession reflect current and emerging clients, firms have redoubled their efforts to raise awareness of financial planning as a career among high school and college students. Pallas Capital and Greenleaf Trust are among the advisory firms piloting new models for internships, offering, respectively, a two-day introductory immersion program and a school-year-long exercise in investing strategies that includes money that participating high school students may keep.

Programs like Native Women Lead and Girls Who Invest have proven their models and recently announced new rounds of corporate support to extend their reach deeper at schools and within underrepresented communities — including humanities majors who might count themselves out of investment-related introductions.

And at colleges that have high proportions of Black students, educators have hit on the winning formula of positioning entry-level financial planning classes as a life skill that can help students and their families immediately, giving nascent advisors an immediate taste of the fulfillment that the profession can offer.