Advisor sees breakdown in women’s careers at the mid-stage, when the pressures of parenting can drag on professional ambitions
When Sarah Bull started her career in financial advice, she’d attend events with one other woman in the room. Walking through a crowd of men to find that other woman, she’d be asked to refresh drinks and bring more hors d’oeuvres. That doesn’t happen anymore.
Bull is a Managing Partner & Portfolio Manager at KJ Harrison Investors. She emphasizes how in her 30+ year career, more and more women have made their way into those rooms. Organizing panels and events now she says she has no problem finding qualified women to speak and participate. Young women brimming with talent are entering the industry now, and Bull is quick to credit all the efforts made across this industry to make that the new reality. For all the ways she lauds that progress, Bull sees a problem with how women’s careers are progressing in advice and finance.
“The industry doesn't have an entry problem, it has a mid-career retention problem,” Bull says. “Firms are super committed to hiring and promoting women. I think entry-level representation is strong. But I think there's this middle where there are some barriers that exist in that middle. If we can get that middle right, then that will strengthen the leadership pipeline and help with C-Suite representation.”
One of the core challenges for women in mid-career, Bull notes, is when the pressures of parenting arise. Women who chose to start families are faced with trade-offs in their career. Recency bias and the rapidly evolving nature of finance mean that even a six-month leave can be hugely damaging to career advancement, especially as the ages that many women have children at tend to be the same ages when they’re likely to make that leap from early to mid-career roles.
That break can be challenging enough for women employed in financial institutions, but it’s especially difficult for advisors. Given the client service model, fee-based compensation, and entrepreneurial nature of the business, time spent away from work and clients can be financially damaging and even see the departure of clients. The choice to have a family may force some women to leave their careers as advisors in favour of other roles. Bull believes that this doesn’t have to be the case.
The approach, Bull says, begins with taking a wider look at families. Men, she says, should be encouraged to take leave and share the early burdens of parenting alongside women. A more equitable distribution of that key domestic labour can help lessen the impact on women’s careers that the choice to raise a family might have.
To make it through this career choke point Bull believes that women need sponsors, not mentors. Beyond advice, they need people who can advocate for them, who will keep them informed and sharp and support their return to work when it happens. Those sponsors can help cover for the missed opportunities that occur on parental leave.
Compensation models are also a core issue to unpack for advisors. Fee-based compensation could result in going months with reduced income, which may incentivize more women to work as financial services employees rather than advisors. While there isn’t a silver bullet, in Bull’s view, some of the broader trends in this industry may help provide solutions.
The rise of advisory teams, she notes, can be a core way that the industry solves for women’s mid-career. Through practice sharing models, the inclusion of associates, and having more than one advisor serving a client these leave periods can be less disruptive for clients and the advisor on leave. The remaining advisors in the practice can act somewhat like a locum physician, covering the new parent’s practice so when she comes back to work her business remains intact. Bull emphasizes that while teams can help, they need to be supported at the dealer level. She cites the example of her own parent company, Harbourfront Wealth Management, which has an “excellent and progressive” HR department that supports team members through periods of leave.
There are ongoing discussions about advisor incorporation, too, which Bull believes could further support advisory teams’ capacity to ease mid-career parental leave. Incorporation, she says, could open the door for more specialization within advisory teams, between planning, investment management, client service, and business development. A shift towards advisory practices as incorporated, specialized businesses could lend itself to professional structures designed to make leave less disruptive for careers.
All these process improvements and structural changes still require sponsorship and advocacy, in Bull’s view. She argues that none of these changes will just come about because they should. Just as the industry has worked to solve for its entry problem, it takes women and men in this industry to push for changes that will benefit them all and bring more talent through that mid-career bottleneck into senior leadership.
“No one just gives people power, you have to earn it and advocate for yourself,” Bull says. “You have to have the confidence to know and ask for what you want, to say ‘I want to be a mom, and I want to work, so let’s figure this out.’ You may get some no’s along the way, but push through it, and find people who you can talk to and ask, ‘how did you do it?’ because there are a lot of us that did it.”
