Wharton@Work

January 2025 | 

Bridging the Gender Gap: Wharton and Girls Who Invest

Bridging the Gender Gap: Wharton and Girls Who Invest

As women in finance approach management-level roles, many encounter systemic barriers that contribute to their departure from the industry — what researchers call the “leaky pipeline” effect. Studies reveal that challenges such as limited access to mentorship, unconscious bias, and work-life conflicts often deter women from advancing into leadership positions. To address this issue, Wharton and the nonprofit Girls Who Invest have launched a new groundbreaking program tailored for early- and mid-career women in finance. By equipping high-performing, seasoned, associate-level talent with targeted leadership training, mentorship opportunities, and strategies to navigate industry-specific challenges, the program aims to retain and propel more women into influential roles, reshaping the future of finance.

The new Investment Leadership Program further strengthens the mission of Girls Who Invest. As CEO Katherine Jollon Colsher shares, “Our goal is to transform the investment-management industry so that it reflects the diversity of the world around it. We envision women managing 30 percent of the world's investable capital by 2030. We believe that by offering world-class, innovative training in investment management, combined with fostering enduring community connections, we can create more opportunities for individuals — particularly women — to thrive and remain in the industry.”

“We were founded based on the understanding that if you give more women access to the industry, they're going to jump at the chance to join it,” says Jollon Colsher. “But there needs to be a concerted effort to recruit talent and train them, because finance is not something that you hear about at the dinner table growing up, irrespective of gender.”

Origins of the Partnership

The Investment Leadership Program builds on Girls Who Invest’s foundational offerings. Founder Seema R. Hingorani, a Wharton alum, approached her alma mater a decade ago to design a Girls Who Invest Summer Intensive Program for rising college sophomores who are interested in learning more about careers in investment management, providing exposure to the industry while also building necessary foundational skills. In the nearly 10 years since its first cohort of 30 scholars came to Philadelphia, the Girls Who Invest alumni community has grown to more than 3,200. “As we experience this exponential growth, building and maintaining the community is as important as our educational pipeline programming,” says Jollon Colsher.

Heather Perceval, head of programs and career advancement, explains, “We recruit individuals from over a hundred different institutions nationwide. These scholars represent all backgrounds, including socioeconomic and field of study. You could be a philosophy major, for example, who is interested in risk, problem solving, and pitching compelling stories to clients to help them make impactful investment decisions.”

The Summer Intensive Program includes sessions taught by Wharton finance faculty and senior-level outside speakers across different asset classes. After the four-week campus portion of the program is completed, the scholars get hands-on experience in seven-week paid frontline investing internship roles across the United States. The program also emphasizes intentional community building, which Perceval says is “the foundation for all GWI programs. The goal is to solidify a community of individuals who can support each other as they grow in their careers.”

A Successful Partnership Grows

The resounding success of the Summer Intensive Program, coupled with overwhelming research on the exodus of women from the workforce in mid-career, led Girls Who Invest back to Wharton’s custom program team. Perceval says, “We approached Wharton to help us design a program for our more tenured alumni that addresses the ‘leaky pipeline’ problem. We worked really closely with the Wharton team, which did focus groups and needs assessments with our partners, our alumni, and our staff to understand the skills that we want to elevate and the conversations we want them to have.”

The Investment Leadership Program launched in October 2024 for more than 40 of GWI’s most experienced alumni, to empower and encourage them to stay in finance. The three-day on-campus experience explored the themes of communication, enterprise mindset, and relationship building. Perceval describes the second day as a deep dive into “what it means to be part of a larger organization as you develop your leadership and build your brand. We talked about navigating power and politics, and how even as a relatively junior person you can influence across different spaces. We complimented those faculty-led sessions with a panel discussion on self-advocacy, both in terms of successfully finding your voice and navigating common challenges. Our goal for the educational sessions is to provide actionable knowledge. We want them to feel like they can go back to work and try the strategies and tactics that they learned.”

For the Girls Who Invest alumni participants, the program will end six months later with a graduation. In the interim, they receive executive coaching, follow-up professional development workshops, and community building. “We want them to feel they can look to the group for support as they advance in their career,” says Perceval. “They came from over 30 different partner institutions in all different types of spaces. And while many of those employers offer in-house women's leadership programs, ours is unique. We’re taking our women outside of the workplace into a neutral space where they can learn, have candid conversations, and build a supportive network.”

“Ultimately,” says Jollon Colsher, “We know that it's proven that diverse investment teams drive better outcomes. There needs to be more representative talent because that results in stronger fund performance. So, Girls Who Invest finds incredibly smart individuals who are exceptionally accomplished, and then we provide them with the opportunity to learn about investment management because they might not have exposure to the industry, but their raw talent far outpaces most people’s, and we're very proud of that. We support them when they're starting out in college and now again when they’re readying for that next career milestone — and we can’t wait to help them continue to move up the career ladder.”