The financial services industry needs to have “younger role models” to support new entrants, Katherine Jardine, senior associate broker at Consilium Insurance Brokers, has argued.
Jardine explained that younger people entering the financial industry can be put off through the underrepresentation of people like themselves as, when reading articles or looking at company websites, “all the pictures are of more senior individuals”.
“This can create a preconceived idea that the profession is for a certain age group or for a certain type of person rather than looking at it as a space where younger people can belong and feel comfortable,” she said.
“I definitely think there needs to be more visibility around younger people within this space.”
Cultivating this visibility is not just limited to an industry level as Jardine argued there needs to be “more of a push at an educational level”, such as at schools and universities, to explain what routes into the industry are available.
Sharing her personal experience, Jardine recounted that in her school she was told to prepare her personal statement, apply for universities, have the interviews, and this was the only route proposed to her.
She was not told that a lot of companies have apprenticeship schemes, graduate schemes, internships - a variety of different schemes she could have been taking advantage of.
Jardine therefore stated that, from a school and university perspective, there needs to be “more visibility” on what the industry is about and the routes in.
Gender representation
Jardine also discussed another group that would benefit from more visibility within the financial services industry, stating: “There seems to be the never ending issue of visibility of women within the industry”.
While she acknowledged that some firms, such as Consilium, are thinking about the issue and doing work to address it, to effectively provide this visibility the whole industry must join the fight.
“There’s definitely not enough being done to remedy this in the industry as a whole,” she added.
Similarly to younger advisers, she pointed out that, if younger women advisers are not seeing women in the space they could be put off as “it makes them feel like it's not a space for them or that they don’t belong there”.
This represents a historical issue as Jardine pointed out that women have not enjoyed a great amount of visibility in the industry over the years and, indeed, only achieved industry milestones relatively recently.
“Liliana Archibald was the first female broker allowed into the Lloyd’s underwriting room and that was in 1973 which is obviously still very recent,” she explained.
“Additionally, it was also in 1973 when the first women were allowed to join the London Stock Exchange.
“You hear those dates and realise that the movement of allowing women into spaces within the financial industry is very recent.
“If there’s been this history of behaviour in these spaces, where people are able to conduct business, of the exclusion of women, then the industry has been built on that and it does become an unconscious bias.”
