EXCLUSIVE: “You can’t be it, if you can’t see it” – Rachel Waters, Man Group in ‘The Fintech Magazine’

In a stubbornly homogeneous industry, Man Group is leading by example on inclusion and diversity. It’s hard but worthwhile work, says Rachel Waters, its Deputy Head of Trading Platform Technology, who shares her experience of what it’s like to be in the minority

“My first job was as a graduate trainee at an investment bank. At the job interview, there were probably 200 candidates, maybe a dozen women, and all of the women got the job.

“I went back to the recruitment consultant and said, ’Is this positive discrimination?’ and they shrugged. That’s quite a burden to have when you’re starting out in your career.”

This was how Rachel Waters began her working life, and it was an experience the says left her with imposter syndrome for years. Though the financial industry runs many schemes to improve inclusivity, a Goldman Sachs study into the US investment market last year revealed that all-male teams accounted for 70 per cent of funds and nearly 60 per cent of assets under management. For all-women teams, the figures were two per cent of funds and one per cent of assets.

It concluded that: “Without intentional practices to address structural barriers or implicit barriers, the industry will continue to skew toward men”. And it’s not just men, but anyone who’s identifiably different to the incumbent majority.

“We’re starting from a very low bar in terms of the makeup of the community we have in the investment industry,” says Waters, who went on to become investment giant Man Group’s deputy head of trading platform technology. She believes that if the industry is serious about tackling bias against any group, it must be addressed from beginning to end – from recruitment to job promotions – and that it shouldn’t assume there is a one-size-fits-all solution.

“What might work for women might not work for social mobility, for instance,” she says. “Diversity isn’t something that you do, it’s something that you get from doing equity and inclusion. It’s about trying to make sure everyone feels absolutely able to be themselves fully at work.”

Nurturing diversity in organisations has been formalised by environmental, social and corporate governance frameworks that run right through modern businesses. But Man Group has rolled up its sleeves and gets involved, even before candidates walk through the door. It recognised that a lack of diversity in the industry means whole sections of society will be unaware of jobs in investment finance and the possibility of building a career there. So Waters’ own department works with an organisation called Code First Girls that helps recruit female technologists.

She says: “We simply weren’t receiving CVs from women, so we came to the conclusion that we would have to fix the pipeline. It’s about having an open door and bringing people in, maybe when they’re not entirely qualified for the roles that are on offer.

“Code First Girls offers free IT training to women, non-binary people, anybody – school leavers, graduates, career switchers, returners – and they are bringing us even more diversity than we bargained for.

“What I would love to see is that nobody walks into a meeting, or a team – at Man Group, or anywhere in this industry – and sees nobody who’s like them”

“We knew we were going to get more women and non-binary people, but what we’re getting is lots of different disciplines as well. They offer free training to anyone who is a graduate, so we’re getting a real range of people, which is fantastic.”

Code First Girls provides a 12-week training course, then participants enter the industry as full-time employees. But Waters says you cannot expect new starters to arrive ready to go from day one.

“To be fair, no one comes into this industry fully formed,” she says. “But we’re doing a little bit more investment lower down in the pipeline to get people up the curve so that they can start to participate fully, so they can feel that they’re comfortable to start fully contributing to the team.

“To someone who doesn’t know anyone who’s had a professional job, or has never been into an office like this, it’s all really strange and unusual, with all sorts of encoded behaviours.”

Looking back on her own experience in her first developer role in banking, Waters says there were so few female role models that when she received a promotion or project opportunity she’d wonder if she was getting special treatment because of her sex. That’s not something she’d want anyone from any group in the minority at work to feel. So she’s interested in boosting representation in as many ways as possible – including through interventions before someone joins the industry, and sponsorship once they’re hired.

She says: “I’ve heard that just four interventions in somebody’s early life can convince them there is a path into these careers for them. If someone goes into a school, talks to pupils about this job and they hear that message, or we invite them into the office for an insight day, they may start thinking, ‘If I work hard, and I’m smart, I can do these jobs, and this is an option for me’.

“Regarding sponsorship, that’s something I’ve benefitted from in my own career. I think having someone who’s advocating for you when you’re not in the room, almost like an uber allyship, if you like, is really important.

“If we’re not sponsoring people who don’t look like us, then that’s ultimately putting a barrier in place for underrepresented groups as they try to move on in their careers.

CHAMPIONING DIFFERENCE

Man Group, which has 1,600 permanent staff of 70 nationalities working in 11 countries, publishes a diversity, equity and inclusion report each year to explain its internal efforts to boost all of them. Among the initiatives highlighted are hosting events for Girls Are Investors, which seeks to promote asset management as a career choice for women and non-binary people, and it works with EnCircle which runs mentoring for Black people in the industry. The business has ‘Drive Networks’ for employees, which promote equity and inclusion for groups and causes, supporting women, LGBTQ+, Black employees, family life, South Asian people, social mobility, new starters, neurodiverse employees, forces veterans, Latin and Hispanic employees and people with disabilities.

In his report introduction, outgoing chief executive Luke Ellis explains: “There should be no particular ‘type’ of person that joins the financial services industry.”

By the end of the year, the highest office holders in Man Group will be proof of that sentiment. Ellis’ replacement is Robyn Grew, a woman with a formidable CV in investment banking, and the incoming chairwoman is Anne Wade.

Grew, who has a wife and son, and is currently the President of Man Group, was described in the Financial Times by her peers as ‘an empathetic colleague and a vocal champion of difference – not diversity in the box-ticking sense but diversity of thought, talent and approach’.

It was the groundbreaking British theatre director Marianne Elliott who said ‘if you can’t see it, you can’t be it’ when talking about women’s career choices specifically, and both Grew’s and Wade’s appointments will send a very public signal to anyone who might feel that the investment industry is intolerant of individuals who don’t conform to the stereotype, that things are changing – in this firm, at least.

The Group’s annual diversity, equity and inclusion report contains measurements of progress with regard to the firm’s gender pay gap, and Waters says such measurement is crucial for progress.

“I know it sounds a bit dry, but if you don’t measure something you don’t know where you are, you don’t know if the things that you’re trying to do are moving the needle,” she says. “Signing up for things like the Tech Talent Charter and some of the social mobility initiatives going on in the City of London, we have to publish our data back, externally and publicly, and that gives us accountability. I think that’s super helpful. It raises awareness internally in the firm as well about how important diversity is as an initiative.

“How diversity impacts on output is quite difficult to measure and I’m not going to make any claims for that. But I would say it’s about the way that the team interacts. I’ve worked on teams where you’ve got two people who’ve done the same course, at the same university – that’s not conducive to challenge, or debate, or creativity.

“The idea of having diversity of background and diversity of thought, is that it generates new ideas, new ways of thinking, and challenge to the conventional way that we’ve been doing things for the past 25 years. That’s what we’re looking for.”

Ultimately, Waters hopes that efforts to improve diversity and inclusivity will mean that a young Rachel in the not-too-distant future won’t be ‘fighting against their nature to succeed in an environment that isn’t set up to work for someone like them’.

“What I would love to see is that nobody walks into a meeting, or a team – at Man Group, or anywhere else in this industry – and sees nobody who’s like them. That should be the norm, that people feel at home when they come into the industry, and I don’t think we’re there yet.

“We can look at the pipeline and look at fixing that at entry level, but then we have to think about retention and promotion, and question ourselves about every opportunity we hand out to people, whether that’s team leading, project work or new challenging projects to do.

“We must ask, ‘Who are the people that we give those to?’ and challenge everybody, so that we can start to create the pathway for people to become future leaders.”

This article was published in The Fintech Magazine Issue 28, Page 76-77