A new study indicates that women remain underrepresented in leadership and advisory roles across the industry, though the pipelines to those roles continue to strengthen.

According to FINTRX, a data insights platform analyzing RIAs and family offices, women make up 28% of the wealth management workforce, yet account for only about 20% of “client-facing” roles responsible for asset management and revenue. The disparities occur among independent RIAs, wirehouses and broker/dealers alike.

FINTRX based its analysis on its dataset for RIAs (which in total covers over 500,000 registered employees at industry firms), including firm-level and rep-level data.

Though only 28% of wealth management professionals are women, the numbers are even lower in other industry subsections; in asset management, women make up 17.9% of the workforce, as well as 28.7% and 26% in investment banking and family offices, respectively. 

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Within “core advisory positions,” female representation is 17.8% within independent RIAs, 22.2% at wirehouses and 21% among broker/dealers, according to FINTRX. 

Among producing advisors at the wirehouses, women make up 23.83% of Merrill’s workforce, with Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley at about 21% and 22%, respectively. UBS is last at 19.44%. 

In all firms, women make up significantly more of the workforce in administrative, legal compliance and operational roles than in client advisory roles. However, the C-level remains mostly male (particularly in CEO and CIO positions), though women increasingly hold COO and CFO positions.

However, the pipelines for talent are growing, according to FINTRX, which found that the median age of women in the wealth industry is 42 (compared to 47 for men); for advisors, women’s median age is 47, compared to 52 for men. Among 20 to 30 year olds in the industry, women make up 37.6% of employees, compared with only 19.7% of employees aged 60+.

However, the data indicate that this growth is mostly in non-advisory positions, with female representation in advisory roles across age groups ranging from about 17% to 20%. 

According to FINTRX, women also lag among employees (and advisors) with lengthy industry tenures (though again, there are differences by age)—31.6% of employees and 26.5% of advisors with less than five years in the industry are women, compared to 16.9% of employees and 13.5% of advisors with more than three decades in the industry.