DAMI to Morgan Stanley: Let’s Work Together to Improve Diversity Among Asset Managers

WASHINGTON, DC – Today, the Diverse Asset Managers Initiative (DAMI) executive director Robert Raben sent a letter to Morgan Stanley, seeking to collaborate and address the barriers faced by women and people of color in asset management. In 2021, Morgan Stanley released results from a survey that examined how attitudes at the intersection of diversity and investing may be holding asset owners back from maximizing returns. The study found that 56 percent of total asset owners – and 70 percent of white asset owners – believe that it is important to incorporate diversity into their investment decisions, but believe that doing so comes at the expense of returns. Of those white asset owners, 20 percent strongly believe that prioritizing diversity sacrifices returns.

“Your 2021 Asset Owners and Investing in Diversity survey makes troublingly clear that the primary barrier that Black, Hispanic, Asian-American and women asset managers face in this industry is prejudice,” wrote Raben. “Your findings cast doubt on the conventional wisdom among leaders in asset management that we have a supply problem of women and people of color; we don’t, we have a demand problem, in that the people who say they are demanding minority talent actually disfavor them.

“While the systematic exclusion of people of color and women from the management of endowment assets has been a question of social justice over time, today it is for us a question of fiduciary responsibility,” Raben continued. “This troubling revelation comes in the face of a number of studies, which show that utilizing diverse managers improves performance.”

Morgan Stanley has been instrumental in the fight to improve diversity among asset managers,  publishing data-backed research and offering actionable recommendations to address the systemic inequities within the financial services industry, including identifying the “Trillion-Dollar Blind Spot” that women and multicultural-owned businesses face.

A full copy of DAMI’s letter is available here.

Since 2014, DAMI has been a leader in the effort to improve diversity amongst asset managers in the financial services industry. DAMI has also worked closely with key stakeholders to build a vibrant, coordinated effort to change the culture of the financial services industry as it relates to asset managers.