Breaking down barriers
More women are at the forefront in an industry that has historically been male-dominated
Over the past 20 years 30 women, who were seen only in operational roles, if at all, have moved into the front line of asset management. The industry has been slow to transform in gender as well as race, but there are incremental gains.
Anet Ahern was both the first female equity portfolio manager at Allan Gray in 1988 — Gigi van Zyl was running fixed income even earlier — as well as the first female CEO of an investment firm, at BOE Asset Management and later at Quaystone. Ahern has also run Sanlam Multimanager. And after a spell at Kokkie Kooyman’s international funds, she has come full circle to run PSG Asset Management.
“It is hard to measure the extent that women were employed in the industry in those days,” says Ahern, “as we didn’t have resources such as Linkedin. And you also have to realise that there is a much wider range of jobs available now that didn’t exist then, such as compliance officer.”
Ahern could have stayed in a low-profile job at Allan Gray but had the opportunity to raise her profile. After the bulk of the Syfrets team left to form Coronation she was given the chance to run its flagship Balanced Fund, and soon after moved next door to BOE, then There are now more women in the industry who have leadership roles and are change makers one of the hottest independent managers. Another of that generation is Magda Wierzycka, who is not a fund manager, but a potent combination of a competent actuary and a star saleswoman.
Coronation grew from a boutique to a major manager in her time. She is now primarily selling index-based funds through her successful Skeleton range — a perfect brand for her as you can never be too rich or too thin.
Not long after Ahern left Allan Gray, Alida Jordaan, a trained cellist, joined the firm where she worked as a research assistant and maintained quant models.
But Allan Gray then was run by a small circle of male decisionmakers, and she moved to Metropolitan Asset Management, which gave her the opportunity to switch into fundamental equity research. She joined Old Mutual Macrosolutions in 2007, where she now runs the equity component of the group’s low equity multi-asset portfolios while John
Orford does the asset allocation.
Another star of Old Mutual is the rising analyst Meryl Pick, who has covered the unlikely pairing of retailers and gold mines; while at Old Mutual’s Futuregrowth boutique Daphne Botha has been running yield-enhanced portfolios for 18 years.
Gail Daniel joined the new Investec Asset Management in 1991 and is the longest-serving member of staff other than founder Hendrik du Toit.
“It was an exciting time in the industry. After the abolition of prescribed assets and the move to defined contribution, pension funds moved from on-balance sheet insurance policies to segregated mandates,” says Daniel.
She is effectively a standalone boutique in her own right with just one product, the R16bn Investec Managed Fund. Daniel has built a reputation for a quirky style, an unusual blend of top-down and bottom-up, taking in factors such as price momentum and earnings revision.
“I stay closely aligned to the research teams, and I take elements of both our quality and 4Factor franchises.” A champion tennis player in her youth, she calls her style flexible rather than aggressive. Daniel says Investec has been accommodating, allowing her to tailor her travel and marketing commitments when her children were small.
What it means: