FCA adviser data

Barely one in six advisers is a woman, and among mortgage advisers the number's gone backwards since 2022. In an industry this male-dominated, that won't fix itself. As a B Corp, we treat equality as a real responsibility rather than a box to tick, and in my experience what genuinely moves the needle is role models. You can't aspire to what you never see. So we've worked hard to bring women through and make sure some of our highest achievers are female and visible. I'm proud that several of our most successful advisers now are women. It matters for clients too. Plenty of people would prefer to talk about their money with a woman, and if the profession hasn't got them, those clients get underserved. On the FCA dropping salutation data, I understand why, it was a crude proxy, but we still need an honest way to measure this, because you can't improve what you won't count. The case for more female advisers is simple, and it's good for the industry and the people it serves.

As someone who specialises in working with women and has a female focused team for 16 years, The FCA have never wanted to be transparant on the data. !6 years ago is was reported (which you can no longer find) around 10% of financial adviser or mortgage adviser were female, I've seen reports that is now 18%. No one wants to admit that the industry was a male dominated industry. There are so many fantastic female adviser firms out there now, more women should be joining industry, what is putting them off?

The FCA hasn't stopped counting women advisers. It's stopped guessing from people's titles, and those aren't the same thing. Its own survey of advice firms, published in April, found women are 18 per cent of advisers but 66 per cent of support staff. The women are already in these firms. They're just not becoming advisers, and that is the more useful thing to know. One caution on the mortgage figures in this story. They're a count, not a share, so they can't tell you whether the proportion of women fell. If you run a firm, don't wait for the regulator to count this. Count it yourself.

The data may be becoming less precise, but the broad picture is hard to miss: financial advice remains a heavily male dominated profession. On these figures, only around one in six advisers has a female salutation.

That matters beyond diversity statistics. Clients come from every background, and an industry built around understanding people should ideally draw its advisers from a similarly broad pool. The commercial case is just as compelling - women control a growing share of the nation’s wealth, yet remain significantly underrepresented among those advising it.

This should be fixable. Efforts to attract more women into the profession, more flexible career paths, and visible female role models would gradually change the balance. But there is clearly still a long way to go before the profession properly reflects the clients it serves.