Age discrimination is likely to be the most targeted diversity & inclusion (D&I) issue for the funds industry, research carried out by Funds Europe suggests.
The research into D&I was part of our wider ‘Product Distribution and Governance Survey’ and comes about at a time of increased scrutiny of D&I by the funds industry in the wider corporate world.
Efforts to tackle the lack of diversity in corporations include in the UK, where in February the Investment Association (IA) said it planned to issue warnings to FTSE 350 companies that fail to deliver improvements in boardroom diversity.
Whereas the perception may be that gender and race are the two principal D&I issues, our survey – which was conducted in partnership with Caceis – showed age ranked top, followed by cognitive diversity and then social background.
Read the wider article and see charts here.
Our results were mean weighted and age diversity scored 3.08. Gender came bottom of six D&I issues with a mean weight of 1.95.
Looking at the steps that the industry may take to encourage diversity, 30% of respondents to our survey agreed that the funds industry ought to set targets for improved representation, with 9% saying these targets should be mandatory.
In contrast, a majority of respondents said that this is best achieved through a balanced set of measures designed to encourage more D&I-related representation across the industry (60%).
Morningstar recently found that only five of the 11 markets it survey had law in place regarding disclosure on diversity policy that apply to investment firms – notably Finland, France, Norway, Sweden and the UK.
*To start reading the full ‘Product Distribution and Governance Report’, see:
Product Distribution and Governance Survey
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