Advance Praise
“I hope every male financial advisor reads this book because it prepares them for what’s about to come: a new period in finance where the different needs, approaches, and goals of women investors will change the face of investing itself.”
—Joe Keefe, President and CEO, Pax World Management
“Harness the Power of the Purse provides insightful guidance and a tactical roadmap for financial advisors and their managers offering a deeper understanding of how to meet the unique needs of women investors.”
—Kathleen Lynch, COO, UBS Wealth Management Americas
“Andrea Turner Moffitt’s book provides data-driven support for a simple yet profound idea: aligning investments and values matters. This book will inspire individual investors who believe in market-based opportunities to create positive societal impact, while providing financial services professionals with an understanding as to why their clients, especially women, are seeking opportunities to invest in this way. And we will all be better off for it.”
—Bruce Usher, Former CEO of EcoSecurities and Director of the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise, Columbia Business School
“Harness the Power of the Purse uncovers one of the most significant market growth opportunities for banks: women. I hope the financial industry pays close attention to the data and insights shared here so we can begin to see the game-changing impact women investors can have as economic powerhouses.”
—Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO, Women’s World Banking
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Copyright © 2015 by Andrea Turner Moffitt
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Set in Minion
ePub ISBN: 978-1-942600-20-6
Moffitt, Andrea Turner.
Harness the power of the purse : winning women investors / Andrea Turner Moffitt ; foreword by Sylvia Ann Hewlett.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-940207-96-4
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Women—Finance, Personal. 2. Finance, Personal. 3. Investments. 4. Women—Economic conditions. 5. Financial security. 6. Portfolio management. 7. Wealth—Management. I. Hewlett, Sylvia Ann, 1946-. II. Title.
HG4521 .M63 2015
332.0240082—dc23
For women investors around the world
May this inspire us to amplify our voice, leverage our economic power, and be a catalyst for change
Contents
Foreword by Sylvia Ann Hewlett x
Part Two: Understanding the Female Investor
6 What Asian Women Want (India, China, Hong Kong, and Singapore) 75
7 Becoming Gender Smart: Embedding Acquired Diversity Inside and Out 101
8 Winning Women’s Business: A Road Map for Advisors 115
9 Winning Women’s Business: A Road Map for Wealth Management Firms 137
Foreword
In 2013, the Center for Talent Innovation made an extraordinary step forward: we quantified the effect of diversity on bottom-lines.
We’d long understood, as had many global leaders in our Task Force, that a workforce diversified by gender, generation, geography, ethnicity, and sexual orientation was good for business. Leaders knew that having sales and marketing folks who “looked like the market” helped the firm connect to that market. We took this much further and posited that having people in R&D who represented target markets might similarly offer a competitive edge: who better to identify unmet needs and market opportunities among underserved populations than members of those populations? Research by social scientist Scott Page had affirmed the wisdom of crowds; Page showed mathematically that diversity trumps ability when it comes to solving thorny problems or predicting outcomes. If so, could we show that diverse teams were more innovative than homogeneous teams? And that diverse companies enjoyed, as a result of their innovation, greater market share?
Bringing our own diverse team to the endeavor, we embarked on a two-year research quest. We surveyed 1,800 college-educated professionals in the US, 700 of whom worked for multinational companies. We interviewed some 60 executives and innovators. We held focus groups with team leaders across industry