Business

Hedge fund industry is still mostly men, new data shows

The hedge fund industry is still dominated by suits, new industry data shows.

Less than one in five hedge fund professionals are women, according to a report released by Preqin on Thursday. And the number drops to just 11 percent when it comes to the senior ranks, Preqin said.

“Ugh,” one female hedgie, who wished to remain anonymous, wrote The Post after seeing Preqin’s findings.

Progress in closing the gender gap in the $3.2 trillion industry has been slow: 19.3 percent of hedge fund professionals are women, up only slightly from the 18.6 percent Preqin observed in November 2017.

“Ultimately, while it is encouraging to see some progress in recent months, there is still a long way to go for female representation in the industry,” said Amy Bensted, head of data products at Preqin.

Some industry professionals hinted that the numbers are actually worse. Indeed, hedge fund publication Absolute Return last year found that there were more funds launched by men named David over the previous five years than funds launched by women.

“We’re tracking statistics on how many women are managing money because that’s where the power is,” Janet Cowell, chief executive of Girls Who Invest, told The Post.

Included in Preqin’s count of hedge fund jobs were positions in investor relations. It’s an area where women appear to be roughly equal to men, holding 48 percent of jobs. But the figures are skewed, with women holding 62 percent of junior staff gigs and only 32 percent of senior staff roles.

And in the highest echelons of the hedgie world, women barely exist. When it comes to the C-Suite, fewer than one in five hold the chief operating officer title while only 4 percent hold the coveted chief investment officer role.

Women are absent from the hedge fund industry versus other financial roles for various reasons, experts said.

Publicly traded financial firms face more pressure from their clients and investors to have a workforce that matches their customer base, Cowell noted. Also, women may prefer to stay with larger financial firms with broader platforms to keep their career options open.

Hedge fund jobs sometimes lack flexibility and some corners of that world can be “especially aggressive and confrontational,” a second female hedgie, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Post.

Despite the depressing figures, some women said they are optimistic that things are changing.

The industry is realizing there are “unconscious biases” in hiring where “like likes like” and it’s trying to change that, the second female hedgie said.

“As an industry, we are not helpless to make progress. Let’s start talking about what’s working to get the numbers up,” Amanda Pullinger, CEO of 100 Women in Finance, told The Post.