Today it appears that conversations about gender bias in investing are reaching a tipping point.

At last year’s Berkshire Hathaway meeting in Omaha, three women met and wondered out loud why female investors were so underrepresented in the conferences and meetings of one of the premier investing events of the year.

But it wasn’t just in Omaha that female investors were missing at the table. At a time when women are making substantive progress in many fields, two statistics underscore the problems faced by female-owned investment companies. First reported in a landmark study by the Knight Foundation “Ownership Diversity in the Asset Management Industry” these are:

Among all investment companies operating in the U.S, only about three percent are owned by women. The total value of Assets Under Management (AUM) controlled by female investors, represents only one percent of all U.S. investment company AUM. So Kim Shannon, the founder and CEO of Sionna Investment Management, LJ Rittenhouse, Berkshire author, financial analyst and inventor of Candor AnalyticsTM and Barbara Ann Bernard, the founder and CEO of Wincrest Capital, decided to do something.

To raise awareness about the gender bias gap in the investment sector – possibly one of the biggest (and most ignored) gaps in business – we would host the Variant Perspectives Conference in Omaha around the 2019 Berkshire Hathaway meeting weekend and explain why this gap persists. We would present the case for growing AUFM: Assets Under Female Management.

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15 April 2019