Changing the Norm

In my industry the average advisor is generally described by three words; white, old, and male. So anything that doesn’t fit into that pattern is considered abnormal, as an example, young white men are considered noteworthy. So women are largely underrepresented and considered the frontier for diversity.

Yes, integrating white women into finance is still considered difficult. That’s how backward this world is.

This leads me to an interesting conversation I had with a friend of mine, who’s also in the industry. I was discussing the challenges I’ve had with my transition but was talking about how positive my clients have been, and how remarkable it is. He responded with, “well of course, you’ve still got the same skills and mind, there’s no difference now.”

“Actually, a lot of people have opened up more to me, not everyone deals the same way with everyone, some people would prefer the option to not have to go to a white guy for advice.” I replied.

You could hear the whiplash in his head from across the table. He’s a progressive guy, but it hadn’t ever really dawned on him that people would want a diversity of advisors that represented the diversity of people that are out there. It very quickly made sense to him, but in those couple of seconds you could see an entire worldview shatter.

There’s a certain self-reinforcing nature when an industry is as homogeneous as finance is. People stop questioning if it should be as old, white, and male as it is, and start to believe that maybe it’s a natural function, that people want it, so it’s a symptom of demand and not supply.

In reality I believe the opposite, if you want professional advice, the only supply is this norm, so the consumer becomes accepting of this and changes their expectations and perceptions to allow this.

We want advice from people that are credible, and have a perception into our problems that we may lack, or a perspective we can’t get because we’re too close. Not everyone has the same life experience or the same problems they need advice with. The better an advisor is able to understand and relate to an experience the better the advice they can provide. Logically that would mean that professionals would represent a broad base of humanity so that there was a large cross section of perspectives available.

The fact that there isn’t has become so ingrained in our thinking that it’s become normal. Once something is normal it becomes accepted, and its hard to change accepted wisdom. Regardless of how much people might not want it.