Episode 26: WIPN

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And welcome to revamping retirement, podcast brought to you by CAPTRUST, where we tackle the retirement plan related issues, plaguing fiduciaries and plan sponsors. Our host Mike Webb has more than 25 years of experience in the retirement plan industry as a nationally recognized subject matter expert. We hope you enjoy revamping retirement. Thanks Kara. Kara McCauley is always our executive producer. Mike Webb here.

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for another exciting episode of the Revamping Retirement Podcast. So excited to have today the executive director of an organization that is over 1,400 strong out there. think especially appropriate this being when we’re recording this yesterday was International Women’s Day. And I believe it’s also Women’s History Month and really just super excited. Welcome please from the Women and Pensions Network or WIPIN.

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Jennifer Knorr, Jennifer, welcome to the revamping retirement. Thank you so much for having me. This is great. So tell us, mean, imagine most of our audience has heard of WIPN in some form already. Let’s give them WIPN for dummies. Let’s just assume they don’t know. Sure, absolutely. So WIPN was founded over 10 years ago in about 2009 and really is an organization for networking for women in the retirement industry to support each other and promote each other and really help with career advancement.

01:30

Um, we, you when started in 2009, there just weren’t a lot of women in the industry. And so a bunch of women got together and said, Hey, let’s connect, let’s network and let’s, um, you know, learn from each other. And since then we have grown to over 1400 members. As you said, we’ve got 33, uh, local regional chapters throughout the nation. And, um, you know, had this year, actually just launched our own proprietary research. So, um, it’s an amazing group of women that are designed to support each other in the retirement industry.

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help with professional and personal development. And let’s talk about the research element of this because some of the stats out there, I do see kind of all over the map. I’ll give you an example. I read an article that said only 33 % of professionals are industry or women. And then I saw one yesterday that said less than 30%. Is this something that the research that you’re doing is designed to talk about or is it something different?

02:24

Yeah, so our research was specifically designed and we partnered with Escalant Research, T. Rowe Price and OneDigital to just really pull and get both quantitative and qualitative information of over 800 women in the retirement industry. just to try, yeah, so to understand, you know, what are their experiences about their career, about their compensation and their, and the work environment.

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in their own professional development. So really dived into the women in the retirement industry. And we’re pretty excited about it because we think it’s the first of that kind of specific research for the retirement industry. And we call it the story of us because we knew we had something to say and we wanted just more data about what women were feeling, what women were experiencing and what are some of the differences in generations, differences in women of color.

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There’s a lot of great news in that research. We found on average, women are making over $150,000 in this industry. Really confirmed a lot of things that we already knew. So for example, over a third of women got their job through networking. really just kind of reinforced the reason of why we have WIPN. And then also identified some areas that where we can really focus on. For example, a lot of women don’t necessarily know how much they’re worth.

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And so they don’t necessarily, Over six in ten don’t know what their value is. So they don’t know to negotiate. So really creating that need and also creating some data to help not only women help women, but also employers really help close the gender gap and also specifically focus like on women of color and things, additional things that they need. So just a lot of great learnings and a lot of confirmations of things we already knew and really good data points to help us figure out what we can do better as an individual, as women, as as employers.

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And it would be wonderful if that became kind of the standard. So I wasn’t reading in one article, hey, it’s 25%. I commend you for that. I post a lot about social media, about sample size. And it is okay when you’re doing a professional group out there, just people know that the sample size is less than a thousand, because I always nitpick about, oh, the sample size is too small for us to draw any conclusions. Well, that’s when we’re talking about retirement plan participants, when there’s a giant field of people for which to choose from. 800 professionals, just so you know.

04:43

in terms of this industry where we do know, unfortunately, that there aren’t the same number of women as there are the general population don’t choose to be in pensions. We know the population here isn’t as big. So they get 800. For a professional organization, that’s a huge sample size. I think that that’s going to give us a lot of really good data. And I commend you guys for doing that. But let’s talk about how the real life application of this stuff. And maybe you can even draw on your own personal experience. I’ll draw a little bit on mine.

05:12

I mean, obviously I’m 52, pale, and male. I’m actually the average age and the average demographic for retirement plan advisor right now. But I do remember when I got first hired, when I first walked in the door, the firm was mostly women and women were in executive positions at the firm that I was at. It certainly is possible to have women in pensions be reflective of the female population, which I think is 54 % female to male in the United States at least. So there’s more women than men.

05:38

I kind of wonder why it doesn’t happen more often that way just by natural circumstances. It’s not like you have some, maybe some certification that it might be biased against women, for example. But I was a radio television film major. They were just looking for smart people and they didn’t care. Like it’s wherever the best it was. But I suspect, I think your survey will probably bear this out too, that there’s not as much of a representation as the general population. Absolutely. And first of all, don’t discount yourself. know, Women in Pensions Network, you know,

06:05

we need men advocates as well. So this is a partnership. And so this is not gonna work. throughout the survey and throughout the research, we found most women had mentors or sponsors and a lot of them were men. And so this is a partnership. This is about all of us working together to make it equitable. A couple of things that I’ll just talk through. First, think one of the things that happens and the McKinsey annual Women in the Workplace study talks about this a lot is that,

06:33

Um, you, it is absolutely right. You know, when women and men get first hired, they’re roughly the same proportion. However, what happens is that, you know, in that first, what we call it that first manager rung, you know, the women, the percentage of women and especially women of color that get promoted to manager as much fewer than men. And so then what happens is once you kind of start there, then it increasingly doubles. Right. And so it’s just sort of, it’s this perpetual circle. So fewer women than men get promoted to, you know,

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manager, then again fewer women, then men get promoted to senior manager, then director, to the VP, and then all of a sudden you get to the C-suite and there’s just fewer candidates there. So that’s one of the reasons why WIPN is so important because you want to make sure that you’re networking and supporting as well as employers to help women and especially women of color get to that level of manager and stay there. And so that’s one of the places that you can sort of first lean in to help make sure that you’re promoting equitably, making sure that you’re doing that.

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The other thing that I would just mention is I think it would be remiss if we didn’t talk about the impact of COVID. According to McKenzie, we had actually been making progress on the number, know, steady, not great progress, but steady progress in the number of women getting promoted through the ranks. That all changed with COVID. So more women than men are actually leaving the workforce. You know, I think it’s one in five men are considering leaving, but one in four women are considering leaving the workforce because of COVID, especially in that manager position.

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Our study found that, you know, work-life balance is critical goal for women, but less than two in 10 are actually thinking that they’re actually achieving that. So just trying to sustain the progress we’ve made through COVID is absolutely critical. And so I think it’s important that we all, you know, support each other through WIPN and thinking about from a manager perspective, what does work-life balance look like? You know, how do you get the work done? We found in our study that eight in 10 women feel they are just as productive working remotely.

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as they are in the office. So how can you balance that, making sure you’re focusing on output and not the activity? Measure the results, not about FaceTime being in the office. It’s about actually delivering the results that you need to do. And so I think organizations like WIPN and networking are even just more critical through the COVID environment. So we’re making some progress pre-COVID, post-COVID. It’s just getting much harder. And so we just all need to lean in onto that. To kind of maybe put a bright side on that and maybe…

08:56

maybe there just isn’t, it’s a tough environment. But I’m kind of hanging those words about working remotely and being productive, because we’re both working remotely now. I like to think we’re as productive outside of this podcast as we are in this podcast. I don’t think that’s really an issue with technology. Maybe that would help, because if we all have the ability to work remotely, would that not help women? First of all,

09:22

it does become a productivity contest. And we know that that’s gonna be representative of the population if that happens. But secondarily, now we can talk about work-life balance separately and how women end up doing a lot more stuff when they’re home and working remotely than maybe men do. Leaving that aside for a moment, you would think that if we stay in a remote environment, and a lot of studies I’ve seen are saying, we’re never going back to what we were with giant offices and everything. You would think that might be helpful.

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once we get a little handle on the pandemic part and women getting and men getting laid off, that this might actually be helpful to the progress. Absolutely. I think you’re right on one thing. know, our research found that women on average are doing about five extra hours per week on household chores than their partners. And some of them don’t even have partners. know, getting that work-life balance is important. I will tell you from a personal perspective, the way that I’ve seen that is outsourcing.

10:16

I firmly believe in outsourcing as much as possible, the things you don’t want to do. And then also, honestly, lowering my standards. I had low standards to begin with, and I’ve just lowered them with COVID. And it’s OK. The fact that it’s not perfect is fine, and just living with that. But I think you’re absolutely right. The workforce is changing. Don’t think we’re going to be traveling as much. We are going to be remote. And I do think that gives us a lot of opportunities, not only for women, but also for hiring.

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So I know that thinking about hiring a diverse workforce, giving them opportunity to do remote means you can really hire anywhere. And that really gives you the opportunity to hire based on skillset and based on skills, not just in your geographical region. So I think absolutely you’re right that there’s remote environment is going to be a plus, not only in terms of creating that ability for women to show up in the way that makes matters and matters most, but also for recruiting. So absolutely.

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Let’s talk a little bit about the recruiting card because we did say that that seems to be more of a level playing field. It’s more of the promotions part. It’s one of those situations where we could have unconscious bias. If the people who are all at the top of the organization are all male, they might just hire males because that’s who they’re comfortable with. It’s not like they’re scheming or plotting to not promote women. But I think on the recruitment front, I think there’s a little bit of that as well. I think there’s been studies that have been shown that if you have

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different names attached to resumes, for example, like female names or names associated with people of color, that sometimes those are biased. Absolutely. So once again, Mike, you are spot on. Research suggests that people of color just having the name are a third less likely to get callbacks on their resume and significantly true for women as well. You one of the things I recommend is try to do the resume review by just taking the name off the resume. Secondly,

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try to get your interviewing panel to be as diverse as possible because then you’ll get those different perspectives. Thirdly, look at the job criteria of how you’re hiring because what is actually required to do the job versus nice to have? know statistically speaking that

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Women tend to only apply for jobs when they’re 90 % qualified, but men will apply when they’re only 50%. So, you know, we in WIPN talk a lot about supporting women and taking that leap of faith to apply and get that level of confidence and, you know, leveraging those different skills. But look at the job description and criteria and see what is absolutely required versus nice to have and what you can actually learn on the job. You know, we all don’t come out of the womb knowing retirement. We need smart people.

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right? And people that have great customer service experience and skills and great relationship building, those are the skills that we need. A lot of the other things can get learned. The final thing I would say is making sure once you do hire them, that you really create a supportive environment. So our research found that over a third of the women of color found that the way that they had to get a promotion was to actually get a raise was to leave the organization. So it’s really important that

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Once you hire people that you create an environment where people feel included and that means making sure that they have, you know, a mentor and a sponsor, making sure that, you know, the culture feels like they don’t have to fit in and change and can be their authentic self. And so we want to make sure that WIPN is a place where every woman feels like they belong. And you want to make sure every work environment does that as well. Wow. That last statistic really was stark. I think about that and I think about what the ideal is. And I realized

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when you say something like that, how far we still have to go. And why I’m so glad that we have organizations like WIPN. And I’m so glad that you were here today. Talk about this. For our wonderful guests, Jennifer Noor, Kara McCauley, and our entire production team at CapTrust, I’m Mike Webb, and this has been Revamping Retirement.

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The discussions and opinions expressed in this podcast are that of the speaker and are subject to change without notice. This podcast is intended to be informational only. Nothing in this podcast constitutes a solicitation, investment advice, or recommendation to invest in any securities. CAPTRUST Financial Advisors is an investment advisor registered under the Investment Advisors Act of 1940. CapTrust does not render legal advice. Thank you for listening to Revamping Retirement.