Minority- and women-owned firms manage only 1.1 percent of US asset management dollars

Evidence

I first began exploring how and where black families invest their income for a paper about pensions and the retirement packages black professionals chose when they were offered plans at work. What I found is that while investing in the stock market is a “rite of passage for white investors” like Susan, for whom it was part of the curriculum at her predominantly white middle school, a lack of diversity in the financial services market makes black Americans’ lack of investment a self-fulfilling prophecy. A 2017 study of asset management firms showed that firms owned by minorities and women manage only 1.1 percent of the industry’s total $71.4 trillion in assets under management. It’s no wonder, Mellody Hobson, a black woman and the co-CEO and president of Ariel Investments, told Investor’s Business Daily in 2019, that potential black investors don’t necessarily feel welcome. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 455

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the book’s core argument that post-racial ‘facial neutrality’ hides entrenched racial structures in ostensibly colorblind industries. — connects to: Women own 40 percent of US businesses but almost none of venture-backed tech — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 691