WSJ: Private-Equity Recruiter Pledges to Consider More Diverse Candidates

More discriminations against White Males:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/private-equity-recru…

Private-Equity Recruiter Pledges to Consider More Diverse Candidates

Jensen Partners, a search firm for the alternative-investment industry, said more than half of the candidates it will consider for future searches will be women or people of color

Executive-search firm Jensen Partners plans to consider more women and people of color for positions it is trying to fill, a change intended to help remedy the longstanding lack of diversity in the alternative-investment industry.

The New York executive-search and advisory company, which helps managers such as private-equity and venture-capital firms find employees, said Wednesday that at least 51% of candidates it will consider for future searches will be women or people of color.

Jensen Partners has spent years tracking diverse candidates in the alternative-investment industry and hopes “to dispel the myth that there are not enough diverse candidates out there,” said Sasha Jensen, the firm’s founder and chief executive. The firm typically does 50 to 60 searches a year for investment and distribution professionals, emphasizing senior roles, in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

“We wanted to hold ourselves and our clients accountable for really giving diverse candidates a chance,” said Ms. Jensen.

The private-equity industry has since its beginnings been overwhelmingly composed of white men, particularly in its upper managerial ranks. This imbalance has persisted despite efforts in recent years, on the part of institutions that invest in the asset class as well as investment-managers themselves, to encourage firms to recruit and promote more female and minority employees.

Progress has been slow. The percentage of women working in the alternative-investment industry rose to 20.3% last year from 18.8% in 2017, according to data-tracking company Preqin Ltd. But the imbalance is greater in the upper ranks of the industry, with women accounting for just 12.2% of senior roles.

Jensen Partners also on Wednesday announced a new product, called DiversityMetrics, for alternative-investment firms to measure, analyze and benchmark the diversity of their workforces. The product also tracks demographic data on more than 25,000 alternative-investment professionals, including more than 8,000 diverse investment and distribution professionals.

Data that Jensen Partners released Wednesday shows low ethnic and racial diversity among alternative-investment firms. For example, among a sample of 2,665 distribution professionals employed by 45 private-equity firms that had a combined $5 trillion in assets, just 2.5% identified as black and 2.8% as Hispanic or Latino, while 75% identified as white, the firm said.

Though there has been some improvement in diverse hiring in recent years, Ms. Jensen said she was not surprised by the data. She said that in comparison with the alternative-investment industry overall, diversity metrics are particularly low at secondaries and private-credit firms, and that fulfilling the pledge to consider 51% diverse candidates may initially be a challenge for senior roles at those firms. Similarly, there are typically fewer diverse candidates for senior investment than distribution roles, such as investor-relations professionals.

“There’s a need across the board to recruit and retain diverse candidates in senior front-office positions,” she said.