To amuse myself on the evening of international women’s day, I compiled a statistic on female fund managers. Summary: there are almost none!
Male and female fund managers
Figure 1: How many US mutual funds are managed by female fund managers?
Here’s what I did:
- I downloaded summary statistics for all US mutual funds in the CRSP database, including manager names, available in 2016.
- For all funds which provided first names of managers (5,483 in 2016), I classified whether the manager was male or female via the first name (reducing the sample to 5,131 – some names were unisex, some abbreviated).
- Out of these 5,131 funds, 442 were managed by women.
- That’s 8.6%. In 2016. Way to go, ladies!
Do firms shun female fund managers?
Figure 2: How many asset managers employ female fund managers?
I also looked at the firms employing female fund managers:
- Those 442 funds belong to 52 asset management firms.
- In contrast, 255 asset managers only have funds where I identified the managers as male. (Of course, the female managers could be reported only by last name, or hidden in the generic “Team Managed” tag…).
- Still: 52 vs. 255 is 20.4%. In other words, 79.6% of asset management firms have no female fund managers. In 2016. And then they call for more women directors in corporations. Way to go, asset managers!
You may also like