Women advisors are at a plateau. It’ll take more than recruiting to fix it

Women now make up just over a quarter of the financial advisor workforce. But after decades of steady gains, that progress appears to be slowing.

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Women account for roughly 26% of practicing financial advisors with known gender, according to an analysis of advisor registration data from industry data tracker AdvizorPro. That figure reflects meaningful long-term improvement, but also a notable plateau. After rising from about 8% of new entrants in the 1970s to the high 20% range in the 2010s, the share of women entering the profession has largely leveled off.

Advisors say the profession’s gender imbalance is, in many ways, a legacy of its past. Advisors tend to stay in the business for decades, meaning older, more male-dominated cohorts continue to shape the industry’s overall composition.

That dynamic shows up clearly in the data. Among advisors with less than 10 years of experience, women make up nearly 30% of the population. Among those with more than 20 years in the industry, that share drops to roughly 22%.

Even so, the rate of growth has hardly budged in recent years. Universities and industry groups have pushed to strengthen the talent pipeline, but some advisors say focusing on recruitment alone overlooks the barriers women encounter once they enter the profession.

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Structural barriers beyond recruiting

Women in the industry say the plateau reflects deeper structural issues that go beyond hiring pipelines.

“The industry as a whole still has parts of it that are outdated and exclusive,” said Autumn Knutson, founder of Styled Wealth in Jenks, Oklahoma. “From not offering flexibility in roles, to the lack of part-time options, to continued statistical differences for opportunities for social or financial advancement, women find themselves navigating a different landscape than their male counterparts.”

Broader societal dynamics often compound those challenges. Women are still more likely to take on primary caregiving responsibilities, making rigid career paths harder to sustain over time, Knutson added.

Others point to a visibility problem.

“We tend to go into professions that we see people like us already in,” said Meg Bartelt, founder of Flow Financial Planning in Bellingham, Washington. “There aren’t a lot of women modeling this profession for younger women to see, so it creates an unfortunate self-reinforcing cycle of underrepresentation.”

For Cary Carbonaro, a financial advisor at Ashton Thomas Private Wealth, the issue is even more fundamental: The industry hasn’t meaningfully changed the environment women are entering.

“Wealth management was built by men, for men, and too many firms are still operating from that old playbook,” she said. “Recruiting more women is not enough if the environment they walk into still feels like bro-culture, if compensation is opaque, if advancement depends on fitting into legacy relationship networks and if success is still defined in a way that ignores how many women lead, communicate and build trust.”

Carbonaro added that firms have focused too heavily on optics rather than structural reform.

“The industry has done a lot of talking and not enough changing,” she said. “Until firms address retention instead of just recruitment, the numbers will not meaningfully move.”

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Channel differences and the breakaway divide

The gender imbalance in wealth management isn’t just about how many women enter the profession. It also shows up in where advisors work and how they build their careers.

Women are most represented in the brokerage channel, where they account for nearly a third of advisors. That share falls to about 25% among hybrid advisors, according to AdvizorPro data, and just 20% within RIAs, the industry’s fastest-growing segment.

Hesom Parhizkar, co-founder of AdvizorPro, attributes some of that gap to structural differences between platforms. Larger firms tend to offer more formalized training programs and clearer career paths, while independent models can feel less defined.

At some of the bigger firms, there’s a clearer playbook, he said. While in more independent environments, it can feel like the “Wild West.” 

Those structural differences may help explain one of the clearest gender divides in the data: who actually makes the leap to independence.

Breakaway advisors — those who leave large firms to start or join independent RIAs — have become one of the defining trends in wealth management. But participation skews heavily male. AdvizorPro data shows men are roughly 50% more likely than women to have a recorded breakaway event.

The drivers behind that gap are complicated, shaped by a mixture of cultural and financial barriers.

“Again, trafficking in gender stereotypes: Women, for I’m sure a variety of reasons, tend to be more risk-averse,” Bartelt said. “Launching your own RIA is a giant risk.”

Women also lack a level of confidence that their male counterparts generally possess, advisors say.

“It is, of course, anecdotal, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a man with basically 14 seconds of experience in this profession talk about launching his own firm,” Bartelt said. “And then I meet a woman who’s been a lead planner for eight years but isn’t quite sure she’s ready.”

Among those who do break away, data shows men and women tend to leave large firms after the same amount of time, typically about four and a half years.

Still, for many women who don’t make the move, a range of barriers can make leaving feel daunting.

Limited access to capital, combined with greater domestic responsibilities and long-standing cultural dynamics, can make stepping away from an established wirehouse a far more difficult decision, Carbonaro said.

At the same time, Carbonaro argues the independent model itself may need to evolve to attract more women.

“Many women do not want to leave one broken model only to recreate it on their own,” she said. “They want independence, yes, but they also want infrastructure, community and a business model aligned with how they actually want to serve clients. That is why I think firms that offer true flexibility, entrepreneurship and support will win more women advisors.”

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Can the industry reach gender parity?

Despite the stalled progress, few see the current imbalance as inevitable.

“If the industry keeps doing incremental change, then [yes], the lopsided demographics will remain for a long time,” Carbonaro said. “But if firms finally recognize that gender equity is not a social initiative, it is a business imperative, then we can make real progress.”

That shift may become unavoidable as client demographics change. Women are increasingly primary earners, inheritors and financial decision-makers — trends that could reshape demand for advisory services.

“The advisor workforce has to reflect the client base of the future,” Carbonaro said. “That means changing who gets hired, who gets promoted, who gets paid and who feels like they belong.”