After more than 25 years in asset management, Angela Samfilippo Gorder is asking a question that is on more and more minds these days: Why are there not more female chief investment officers in the alternative investment industry?
Her career has been mainly in business development, raising capital and delivering client service at institutional, credit-focused investment managers such as Pine River Capital Management, O’Brien Staley Partners and Argentem Creek Partners. More recently being elevated to a managing partner role, she shifted her focus to strategic decision making, business risk assessment and management of the firm.
She has served on firm-wide committees overseeing operations, risk, compliance and other functions related to institutional fund management.
Her latest work, dubbed The Retention Project, started almost two years ago. Gorder had just started reading a book, Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World, about the historical misunderstanding of women’s health. As she put it down, she could not help but think about the plight of women in the 1400s but the women she knew — here and now. She remembered the teams of women she led over the years.
She remembered especially the women, who were trying to navigate pregnancy and maternity leave in a male-dominated industry without disrupting their careers. Something needed to change.
“As an industry, we have made great strides in recruiting women,” she said in a nod to groups such as 100 Women in Finance and Girls Who Invest. “But we are still losing too many in their 30’s as they go to build a family alongside their careers.”
After about 50 interviews into her goal of talking with 200 women in the industry, Gorder found a common thread. As she never had children, it came as a shock, but at the same time it was painfully obvious.
One of her interviewees candidly told her, “Two years ago, I had my first child and gave up my role. I love my son, but every day I miss my investment work and am so jealous of my husband as he trots off to his job that was not disrupted for one moment by our child. With every day that passes, the chances of me going back are diminishing.”
Another woman told of having 10 weeks off but then being forced to travel to London, a trip that meant she had to stop breastfeeding her daughter, only to leave her wondering whether the health issues the girl would later develop stemmed from that fateful decision.
A key focus of The Retention Project is developing the supportive framework called The Protocol for women in their childbearing years when they are most likely to pause their career or take a lessor role to be the chief caregiver. The Protocol outlines a series of human resource policies that create the foundation to make leave doable and helps women transition back to work. The challenge is steep as most firms with fewer than 50 employees are not required to adhere to the Family Medical Leave Act, which grants women 12 weeks of unpaid leave to have a child with the guarantee they keep their job.
She has found that many alternative investment firms lack as much as a maternity leave policy. She hopes to change the bias in these organizations through her talks with men in the industry, many of whom are dads who have daughters whom they would like to see succeed as well.
“It’s time to standardize maternity leave so we can all avoid these awkward conversations and the cycle of failure that ensues if the conversations are not had,” Gorder wrote in a recent social media post.
The Protocol also calls for the formation of a support team made up of not only just an HR representative, but also an executive who the employee doesn’t report to and who can effect change. The team works with the female employee from the time she announces she is pregnant through the first month or so after she returns to work.
Investors demand diversity
BNY Mellon Pershing’s Capital Introduction Team recently interviewed allocators about the role of women-led funds in the industry. A majority of investors (73%) said they had exposure to women-led funds in their portfolios. Survey respondents also stated that the biggest challenge in finding women-led strategies revolved around the “limited universe of funds” that fit into this category, officials said.
For Gorder, this is where she is able to move the needle with The Protocol. Not only is she interested in getting fund management HR departments to implement the policies at no cost to managers, but she is also working with LPs to promote a certification that can signal that a firm takes seriously the support of women at the firm and the goal of promoting female leadership.
She has also collected in her research the names of companies that are known to be female friendly and in turn found women looking for just such places.
“Women want to work at organizations that respect them and treat them as humans,” Gorder said of what is in her view a modernization of the workplace that is way overdue.
