“Women are finding their places on the front lines of the securities industry,” read an article published by Registered Representative in 1985. It reported that women made up 13 percent of the overall broker population, according to the magazine’s survey that year of over 3,000 brokers.
But that number hasn’t shifted nearly enough over the intervening decades. According to 2014 data provided by Cerulli Associates, only 13.8 percent of brokers working in the wirehouse, regional and independent broker/dealers today are women. Overall, women make up 11.5 percent of all financial advisors, with the highest concentration of women working as advisors in the banking channel (33.3 percent) and the lowest concentration working in insurance channel (4.1 percent). Today, women make up 15.4 percent of the advisors working at the wirehouses.
Here we look back at some of the early female pioneers profiled by Registered Representative magazine back in the 1980s and check out where they are today.