One of the country’s largest superannuation funds has announced a goal to ensure all its external asset managers will include at least one woman on their investment teams this year.
First reported in Australian Financial Review, the industry super fund HESTA said 2025 would be the first year that each of its 70 domestic and international asset managers will have mixed gender investment teams. It comes as the superannuation giant aims to push its asset managers to reach 40 per cent female fund managers by 2030.
Women make up almost 80 per cent of HESTA’s members, a fund which manages $93 billion of retirement savings. In 2020, the company helped found 40:40 Vision, an investor initiative aspiring to achieve gender equality in ASX300 executive teams by 2030.
Over the coming months, the company is expected to release its latest biannual survey of its external managers. According to AFR, the 2025 report will reveal that women made up 28 per cent of its workforce last year. The figure has been steadily climbing since 2018, when it was at 17 per cent, and 24 per cent in 2022.
The last report released in August 2023 found that women make up 42 per cent of their investment management team, including 67 per cent on its investment committee and half of head of investment management roles.
Sonya Sawtell-Rickson, HESTA chief investment officer said her company would “aim to allocate future capital to investment partners who capture the benefits of gender diversity” but would avoid implementing strict rules that would determine how the fund allocates its capital based on diversity metrics.
Sawtell-Rickson added that the company has not ruled out giving capital to all-male teams, and that she is cautious of making firm commitments that might drive certain actions that would not benefit its members.
Meanwhile, HESTA has also been pushing its investment partners to undertake regular gender pay gap analysis and establish more inclusive workplace policies to attract more women to the sector.
In the last few years, superannuation funds have been pushing to promote gender equality in the male-dominated industry.
AustralianSuper’s latest figures show a gender balance among staff (51 per cent women); on the board (58 per cent women); at the rxecutive level (50 per cent women); and 43 per cent women in management personnel.
UniSuper’s latest Gender pay gap report released in April found that women fill 42.9 per cent of the leadership roles at the fund, while 55 per cent are on the board of directors and 44 per cent are in executive leadership teams.
Last week, Christine McLoughlin, chairwoman of Aware Super, told an audience at an investment conference in London that she would “[not] tolerate an organisation that doesn’t genuinely raise diversity and inclusion.”
“Diversity has in many ways come a long way over the last few decades of my career,” she said. “[But] I’m still quite often the only woman in the room and that really saddens me.”
Aware’s Private Equity head, Jenny Newmarch, added that the fund has made a series of gender-related pledges recently to promote diversity in its portfolio, including a policy which mandates that an investor will not invest with private equity managers that have all-male investment teams.
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