HFA: Working Towards Gender Balance with Meredith Jones, Author of Women of the Street

NEW YORK - March 24, 2016 - PRLog -- Asset TV traveled to Chicago this past week to attend the Hedge Fund Association's Women in Hedge Funds Symposium and had the opportunity to speak with the moderator of the event, Meredith Jones, author of Women of the Street: Why Female Money Managers Generate Higher Returns (And How You Can Too).  Hosted by Morningstar, Inc., HFA's symposium provided insights and discussion covering gender differences in hedge fund investing.

One of the key points of the symposium was that by having more women on Wall Street, everyone could ultimately benefit.  As Meredith explained, this can happen in a number of different ways.  "There's research that shows that women have a tendency to produce higher returns in their investments…by generating those higher returns people who invest with women can make more money," Meredith stated. "In addition to that, women invest differently than men due to certain biological, cognitive and behavioral factors and so that creates additional diversification…which can help mitigate volatility within a portfolio and ultimately if there were more women on Wall Street, could help mitigate volatility in the overall market, as well."

But Wall Street isn't the only sector that could benefit from a more gender-balanced demographic.  If more women were engaged in venture capital and private equity, more funding would go towards companies founded by women.  As Meredith explained, "What's important about that is that companies with women as founders have a tendency to perform better financially…they also have a tendency to create jobs at a higher rate than male-run companies, and they were net job creators throughout the financial crisis."

While the benefits of having more women in the financial sector are certainly numerous, the solution is not an easy fix.  Currently, the ratio of men to women within the hedge fund industry is about 80-1, and the private equity and venture capital stats are not much better.  Additionally, according to a study released by Morningstar last year, within the mutual fund space only 2% of the global mutual fund assets were managed by women.

Being that far off-balanced is a difficult problem to correct, however Meredith left Asset TV with some insight moving forward, "It's definitely evolution not revolution.  There's nothing that we can really do that's going to make a significant change tomorrow, but what I think we have to think about is both the pathway for getting women into the industry, how do we approach this from a high school-age, from a college-age, to encourage women to want to pursue this as an industry, and then once we do get women who want to come into this industry, how do we put them on an equal playing field."

To view Meredith Jones' interview in its entirety and to see other interviews from the HFA symposium, tune into Asset TV:  http://bit.ly/1UOuuld


About

Asset TV is the investment professional video platform for research and education.

Over 2,500 video reports are available to watch on-demand, currently accessed by a global audience of 400,000 Financial Advisors, Institutions, Consultants, Plan Sponsors, Endowments & Foundations, and Wealth Professionals.

Asset TV is used as a valuable source of Continuing Education - viewers can register for free and access their own video history for CE credits including accreditation from the CFP Board, IMCA and CFA Institute.

Asset TV is a founding partner of the Bloomberg terminal video service, extending the reach of content to a global audience of 350,000+ institutions.

For more information, visit Assettv.com.