PE on-cycle recruiting for women
Were there any specific on-cycle PE recruiting events for women conducted by PE firms? Any Women want to share their recent PE on-cycle recruiting experience?
Nothing in particular that stood out. I believe one of the recruiters sent me some webinar or something, but don't know if that's something that could be converted to an interview. I know some women who got coffee chats and stuff but don't think that was exclusive.
I got my offer during on-cycle from a normal process, superday'd with a couple non-diversity men. Don't think there was another woman there actually (pretty small final group).
It might've helped me get some interviews from HHs and/or when they made final decisions. But any of that would've been behind the scenes based on my experience.
Thanks for sharing. Did you do any women's networking before going on-cycle? Anecdotally, is there a big exodus of women in your firm?
I did not, to be honest I jumped into recruiting pretty suddenly and wasn’t all that set or prepared for it going in. I’m not blind to the possibility of some preferential treatment during the actual process, but otherwise didn’t really get any clear structured help. I know other pretty qualified women who spent more time recruiting than I did / talked to more firms. I don’t believe any of them had real programs either unless they were also racial diversity (SEO, MLT, etc).
Re: women leaving my bank, there isn’t necessarily a mass exodus to buyside by any means. I think typically I see more women than men going into other (some admittedly very cool) fields — corporate finance in cosmetics, food tech startup, headhunter firms, investor relations. I also frankly don’t have very many women in my group or in groups I’m close with so some of this is just aggregating rumors.
I think if I had to guess, it’s a pretty similar breakdown to the men. Small percentage of A2A’s, decent chunk of PE, maybe a couple HF, and then miscellaneous. Maybe a little more miscellaneous among the female group would be the only difference. Also I’m at a bank where most people leave, period.
PE firms are just not under the same public/investor pressure to diversify as big banks are. I think 1 or 2 MFs have held pre-oncycle diversity events in the past, but don't expect a large women's recruiting push like banking. You may get a slight edge when it comes to getting interviews, or up against an equally good candidate, for being diverse but PE is still much more white male dominated than IB
Interesting observation. Based on this article, one would think the gender recruiting is hot and heavy. Maybe the senior associate levels are staffed out of MBA programs in order to bump up their gender numbers?
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1xdw199h92d8f/Despite-Pr…
"In private equity 54 percent of junior-level women...44 percent of senior associate roles were held by women in 2020. At the managing director level, this number dropped to 20 percent"
The article doesn't specify, but I have a real hunch they are including ALL employees with that title at any given firm - i.e. having 6 female admins counts towards the 54/44% stat.
Having worked with a number of PE firms I would peg the % of female investment professionals around 20-30%, generously. PE firms will still happily have a "people" page showing 20+ white men and 2-3 female admins and see nothing wrong with it
While not as much pressure as large banks, LPs starting to apply some pressure. Had headhunters who placed me specifically ask for most qualified 1st year women as “clients starting to apply pressure to find higher quantity of qualified female candidates”
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