The City summer party season has begun. I kicked it off with a fifth-anniversary party for Neptune Investment Management last Thursday. I like Neptune: they’ve got good funds and a good business, and offering drinks after hours at the Wallace Collection is clearly a fine way to win fans. But the party had one faintly off-putting aspect: the statue garden where we were gulping champagne was a sea of suits. There were one or two daintily dressed women dotted about but, with only one exception who I recognised, they were PR types or journalists. The fund managers themselves were all men.
The same will be true at every money-related party this summer and I see it in every other kind of City event I attend or organise. I’ve been running an investment round-table discussion every month for three years and in all that time I’ve had only one female participant, Marina Bond, manager of the Rathbone Smaller Companies fund. That’s not for want of trying to make things a bit more diverse: if I stop to think of all the female fund managers I know, I can only come up with five or six. Over 90 per cent of Britain’s fund managers are men.
It isn’t just in the professional world that women seem to fight shy of money management. Building up income-producing assets is particularly important for women — we’re the ones who most often give up work and salary income to look after children — yet we just don’t do it. According to a recent survey by Investec, the average woman has over a quarter of her wealth held in cash. Worse, 7 per cent of us have all of our money held in cash and overall more than 2 million women have over £25,000 sitting in a bank account where, day after day, when inflation and tax are taken into account, it loses rather than gains in value.
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