Like punk band Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna says: Girls to the front.

Many Wall Street jobs have traditionally been male-dominated, and financial advice is no exception. Just under a quarter of certified financial planners are women, a figure that has remained remarkably flat since the early 1990s, according to CFP Board data. More women are becoming CFPs each year, but men are entering the profession at nearly the same pace. The gender makeup looks much the same today as it did when the Riot Grrrl movement started.

“Getting from roughly a quarter to half the profession isn’t something you achieve by recruiting more women into a system that hasn’t changed,” said Kathryn Berkenpas, chief operating officer at the CFP Board. “A lot of attrition happens mid-career, often tied to firm culture, compensation transparency and access to sponsorship or book-of-business transfer opportunities, not a lack of interest.”

We Don’t Wanna Assimilate

Much of the profession’s gender gap comes down to a lack of awareness, said Cary Carbonaro, an advisor at Ashton Thomas Private Wealth. “A lot of women think it’s a 100% sales, eat-what-you-kill job, but that’s just one career path,” she told Advisor Upside. “That’s the hardest track and turns a lot of women off from the profession, but there’s a million other roles in financial planning where you don’t have to hunt and get clients.”

The industry’s cutthroat mentality and gregarious stereotypes initially discouraged Korinne Sugasawara, founder of Kite & Compass Financial. “As an introverted queer woman of color, I just never saw myself reflected in this field,” she said. The profession’s language can also be off-putting, she added, noting that financial planning should be rooted in mutual trust rather than “chasing down” clients.

We Wanna Make It Easier. To help bring more women into the profession, the CFP Board and Carbonaro announced a scholarship last week:

• Carbonaro’s $125,000 donation will award $5,000 per student seeking to complete a CFP program, which would qualify the student to sit for the CFP exam.
• The scholarship is specifically designed for women career changers. Carbonaro herself first worked in marketing and product development on Wall Street before transitioning to a fiduciary role.

“Women aren’t simply a demographic the profession needs to recruit, they’re an increasingly important client base,” said Francheska Ruiz, a CFP with Tobias Financial Advisors. “It’s becoming even more important for the profession to better reflect the people it serves.”

Let’s start with a little role play.

Imagine you’re a highly successful business owner and you’ve appointed your son or daughter to a key management position. Despite your guidance and best intentions, however, they consistently fail to meet expectations. Would you have the resolve to fire them?

The natural relationship dynamics that unite families can cause significant strife if allowed into the workplace, according to Alejandro Cárdenas Villa, an author and family business advisor. While it’s not always easy to do, separating familial relationships from business roles is critical for both family harmony and business stability, and avoiding difficult decisions is often a recipe for disaster. Fortunately, experienced advisors can do a lot, and it all starts with facilitating frank conversations.

“Family relationships may be unconditional, but a role in the family business cannot be,” Cárdenas told Advisor Upside. “Most conflict that I’ve seen in family businesses has been caused by the older generation, let’s say the founder, because they haven’t had the courage to make tough decisions. It becomes a ticking time bomb for the next generation.”

The Big Question

Successful business owners often dream about bringing their kids into management once they’re old enough. It’s not an inherently bad idea, Cárdenas said, but it’s crucial to ask whether you’ll be willing to make the tough choice if they don’t measure up.

“Probably the best piece of advice I can give to founders in this situation is to take the decision out of your own hands and to be forthright from the start,” Cárdenas said. “Your children need to know from the very beginning that performance matters and that they will be held accountable as they would be in any other workplace.”

Other helpful tactics include:

• Naming an independent party who is going to make key hiring and firing decisions, such as a headhunter or board of directors.
• Avoiding the natural instinct to pay all children equally even if their roles and responsibilities differ significantly.
• Balancing the needs of managers and owners in a sustainable way.

Ownership vs. Management. Even if family members aren’t brought into management, they still need to be trained to be a future owner and inheritor of significant wealth. “You can outsource the management of a family business, but you can’t outsource ownership,” Cárdenas said. “You have to recognize and address any troubling patterns of behavior among siblings, for example, and encourage people to act like mature adults when conflict arises.”

To borrow from Apple’s famous slogan of the late aughts, there’s an app for that. Or at least, there’s wealth management tech.

As more financial advisors extend their services beyond traditional investment management, they’re employing tools that can help them get ahead. A recent report from Cerulli found that roughly half (47%) of advisors who are not currently using portfolio tax optimization technology expect to start in the next year, and 37% of those who aren’t tapping specialized estate planning technology plan to adopt it within the same time frame.

“The right technology helps clients understand their full financial picture, find tax savings and get organized in ways that used to take far longer,” said Adam Spiegelman, founder of Spiegelman Wealth Management. “The challenge is that the bar for sophisticated advice keeps climbing, and advisors who don’t invest in these tools — and the expertise to use them well — will find it harder to meet what clients now expect from a comprehensive relationship.”

Growing Tool Boxes

Advisors are certainly feeling the pressure of changing client demand. While much of what they provide is still grounded in tried-and-true investment management services, they’re offering 7.6 services on average, the study found.

“Investment management used to be the differentiator, but today it’s just the baseline,” Spiegelman said. He added that clients expect advisors to understand taxes, estate planning, insurance (both personal and property/casualty), Social Security and increasingly Medicare, not just markets. That’s even led his firm to evaluate Medicare planning software.

But building a tech stack comes with challenges:

• Roughly seven in 10 advisors identify integration as the biggest pain point with the technology that they use.
• AI is a “potential game changer” in terms of increasing the efficiency with which advisors can offer income tax planning and estate planning, which have historically been fairly laborious and time consuming, said Michael Rose, director of Cerulli’s wealth management practice. But “some of these solutions are relatively expensive compared to other technology solutions advisors use, and are less likely to be used on a daily basis, which according to our research, has been a barrier for adoption.”

Uncle Sam Calling. Not all services are on every advisor’s implementation list. For instance, just 40% of advisors offer income tax planning. That’s the result of a variety of factors, including firm policies that restrict advisors from offering tax planning, insufficient knowledge and expertise necessary to offer tax planning, preferences among some advisors to partner with a CPA who can offer those services and more, Rose said.