Women entering wealth management at unprecedented rate

The rising number of women entering wealth management and launching registered investment advisory firms signal that the industry’s infamously low female representation may be changing.

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But women nevertheless comprise only 28% of registered representatives, 21% of producing financial advisors and 22% of industry C-suite executives, according to a study released earlier this month by FINTRX, an artificial intelligence-powered data analysis firm focusing on RIAs and family offices. The underrepresentation “in the roles that drive client ownership, revenue generation and long-term leadership” and, among producing advisors in particular, continues to reflect “a structural imbalance in the industry’s core advisory positions,” the study said. 

However, the data on younger or less-tenured advisors also show that industry efforts often led by women to recruit and advance more female talent are starting to pay off, said Emily Goldman, the vice president of data and research at FINTRX. The share of women who are producing advisors in their first five years in the industry, 27%, is nearly double that of producing advisors with at least three decades of experience, 14%. 

“There have been great strides overall in the industry, but I think, when it comes to the revenue-generating, strategic leadership positions, there’s still a bit of a lag,” Goldman said. “There’s an opportunity here for firms to create more pathways into these roles of being a producing advisor that then have the natural progression to those relationship management, strategic leadership roles.”

READ MORE: Planning for internal RIA succession? Experts say it takes a decade

Key data takeaways

Her team scraped data from public and private databases on more than 500,000 registered representatives last month and used its AI tools to analyze their roles and titles against their genders. At 28%, the share of reps who are women is higher than the 18% of female asset management professionals and 26% of family office staff members, but slightly lower than the 29% in investment banking roles. But 58% of registered reps who are men are producing advisors, compared to just 38% of the women. 

Across three main industry channels, 18% of producing RIA advisors are women, while they comprise 22% in wirehouse firms and 21% at other brokerages. Out of the four wirehouses, Merrill (24%) had the highest female representation among producing advisors, followed by Morgan Stanley (22%), Wells Fargo Advisors (21%) and UBS (19%). In terms of executive roles, chief financial officers and chief operating officers “tend to have significantly higher female representation relative to other executive positions,” while CEO and chief investment officers “remain more heavily male-dominated” and display “a notable gender gap,” the study said.  

The figures about less-tenured industry professionals demonstrate how those trends could shift over time. Women comprise 38% of reps who are between 20 and 30 years old and 32% of those with fewer than five years’ experience in the field. Younger professionals and advisors are more likely to be women — even though the numbers don’t come terribly close to their representation above 50% in the U.S. But FINTRX’s data found that at least 263 women opened their own RIAs in the past nine years, with a new high over that span of 39 in 2025.

“Women are entering wealth management in greater numbers than ever before, yet they remain significantly underrepresented in the roles that drive client ownership, revenue generation, and long-term leadership,” the study said. “These findings highlight a critical inflection point for wealth management. The pipeline of female talent is growing, but the transition into revenue-generating advisory roles and executive leadership remains uneven. How effectively firms support advancement into these positions will likely determine the pace of gender parity across the industry over the next decade.”

READ MORE: When should a financial advisor launch an RIA?

Changes over time

In past decades, industry and professional development programs have aimed to shed wealth management’s longtime reputation as a boys club — along with the accompanying loss of advisor talent and business opportunities. That programming includes advisor mentoring and networking efforts, conferences bringing women in the industry together and marketing or branding that cater to women specifically as wealth management clients, or combinations of several of those at once. For example, amid International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month this March, RIA firms Allworth Financial created the Allworth Women’s Collective and Mercer Advisors launched the National Women & Wealth Practice. 

Mercer Advisors

The executive ranks at Denver-based Mercer are 40% women, and the firm’s client-facing team members are almost 50% female. The new training, networking and female-focused client resources stemmed from the idea to “have a spot where women professionals could come and do the best work of their careers,” along with a destination for customers seeking to work with them, said Laura Combs, an executive managing partner with Mercer who is its head of women and wealth. With the prominence of women in the looming transfer of wealth to spouses and younger generations, Mercer’s executives and advisors view the new program as “something that the industry needs and the industry is asking for,” she said. 

The push to recruit more women from college campuses or other careers — such as Combs’ work under an earlier Mercer initiative called InvestHERS to provide career advice and mentoring through the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business — are presenting the industry as an option to many more prospective female professionals.

“We’ve focused on, how do we be a firm of choice for women advisors?” Combs said. “When I came out of college, I wasn’t thinking about wealth management. … We’re starting to see that show up in this under-30 age demographic for new advisors that are interested in the career path.”

And firms that don’t open those trails to career development to more women may be saying goodbye to promising advisors.

“There is progress, it’s just slow,” Goldman said. “If they’re not able to find it at their current firm or these larger firms, the industry has evolved in a way that has allowed them to break out and create their own firms.”