Undiversified

Ellen Carr has worked as a high-yield bond portfolio manager for over two decades, most recently at Barksdale Investment Management, a majority-women-owned institutional fixed-income investment management firm. She is also an adjunct finance professor at Columbia Business School, where she teaches credit markets and cash flow modeling. She writes for the Financial Times on occasion.

Katrina Dudley works for Franklin Templeton Investments, one of the world's largest asset management firms. She wrote the foreword to the Vault Career Guide to Mutual Funds (2016).

Diversification is a fundamental investing principle. However, money managers have not implemented it in their own ranks. Only about 10% of portfolio managers—the people most directly responsible for investing your money—are women, and the figures are even worse at the ownership level. What are the causes of this underrepresentation, and what are the consequences, including the bottom lines of firms and clients?

In Undiversified, experienced practitioners Ellen Carr and Katrina Dudley investigate the gender imbalance in investment management and propose solutions to address it. They explore the barriers that subtly but effectively discourage women from entering and staying in the industry at each point in the pipeline. At the entry level, the lack of visible role models discourages students from considering the field, and those who do embark on an investment management career face many obstacles to retention and promotion. Carr and Dudley emphasize the importance of informal knowledge about career paths, without which women are at a disadvantage in an industry that values confidence. They showcase a diverse constellation of successful female portfolio managers to demystify the profession.

Undiversified makes a compelling case for increasing the number of women in active investment management at a time when it is under threat from passive strategies and technological innovation, based on extensive research, interviews with prospective, current, and former industry practitioners, and the authors' own experiences.

Author: Katrina Dudley and Ellen Carr

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08NFK2GDX

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 20 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #931,514 in Kindle Store

#141 in Investing Portfolio Management

#353 in Investment Portfolio Management

#593 in Women & Business (Kindle Store)