Women and money make a perfect match

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.