Did you know that, despite years of focus on diversity, the share of women across EMEA Distribution still sits below 30%, and has barely moved in a decade?
The starting point for addressing diversity is understanding the shape of the market: who is in it, at what level, and whether that is changing. In September 2023 we mapped the entire EMEA Buy Side Sales universe, c.8,300 Institutional and Wholesale salespeople across more than 500 companies. We believe it remains the largest clean body of diversity data on the EMEA Asset Management sales and distribution function. The figures below are that drawn from that snapshot.
The number behind the number
Women make up 27% of the EMEA sales workforce across all levels of seniority. At the top, that figure falls to 20%: the team heads, country heads and regional heads who run the desks. Whatever progress is being made at entry level is not yet reaching the senior ranks.
More telling is the lack of movement over time. The proportion of women being hired in 2022 looked much like it did in 2013. Over the five years to 2023, women accounted for 28% of hires, just one percentage point above the standing benchmark of 27%. A decade of attention has produced a market that recruits women at almost exactly the rate at which they already exist within it. That is not progress; it is simply replacement hiring.
The average hides the regions
The pan-EMEA figure conceals wide regional variation. France leads, with women at 35% of the salesforce and 30% of leadership. Southern Europe follows at 30% and 26%. The UK sits mid-table at 26%, while the Nordics, Germany and Switzerland cluster at 22% and MENA trails at 21%. The leadership picture is starker still. Germany has the lowest female representation among sales leaders, at 14%, with the Nordics and Switzerland at 16%.
Channel matters as much as geography. Within the UK universe of c.2,600 salespeople, the Institutional channel is close to twice as diverse as Wholesale, at c.31% women against c.17%. Consultant Relations is the most diverse part of the market, at 36%. Where a firm chooses to compete shapes the diversity it can realistically expect to find.
The seniority taper
A single pattern runs through almost every market. Diversity is reasonable among juniors and thins as experience rises. In the Nordics the female share falls to 12% in the 26 to 30 year experience cohort; in MENA, the most experienced people are almost entirely men. France is the exception that proves the rule: it both hires and retains women as the population ages, which is precisely why it also leads on leadership.
The lesson is that hiring young women is necessary but not sufficient. Without retention and promotion, an encouraging junior intake simply drains away before it reaches the top, and the senior gap persists. In our experience, most firms underestimate how concentrated their own diversity is at the junior end until they see it set against the wider market.
What the data is for
Benchmarking turns a vague aspiration into a measurable target. It is the reason we built the ‘Godliman Rule’, modelled on the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which asks clients to interview at least two diversity candidates on every shortlist. The case for it is straightforward. As Andrew Haldane, then Chief Economist at the Bank of England, argued in a 2016 speech to the Diversity Project, the conventional filters of academic record, work experience and ‘social skills’ ‘may, inadvertently but unhelpfully, disadvantage certain cohorts of society’. Selecting on track record alone screens out the very candidates a diverse shortlist needs. The evidence on shortlists themselves is just as clear: when only one woman is on the list, her statistical odds of being hired are close to zero.
This is why diversity benchmarking sits at the centre of our ethos as a firm. We use the same Best-Fit Assessment process for our own hires that we offer clients, because assessing fit rather than filtering on credentials is what allows a more diverse shortlist to emerge in the first place. For companies wanting to understand their own position, the first step is rarely a new policy. It is an honest look at the numbers, channel by channel and cohort by cohort.
This article draws on our September 2023 EMEA Distribution dataset. If you would like to see how the diversity of your own salesforce compares with the market, or to read the full Gender Diversity in EMEA Distribution report, please contact Rupert Reed at r.reed@godliman.com.
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