The number of women fund managers is gradually increasing. A total of 42 women are now managing funds either as primary or secondary managers, up from 32 last year, according to a report by Morningstar Investment Adviser India.
Incidentally, the total number of fund managers have also increased this year, up from 399 to 428, the Women in the Indian Mutual Fund Industry—2023, the seventh edition of the report by Morningstar, said.
The 42 women fund managers are spread across 24 fund houses, with five fund houses having three or more women fund managers, six with two women fund managers, 13 with at least one woman fund manager.
About nine of these women fund managers have been managing funds consistently for over five years. Five fund managers have been managing funds between three and five years, and 28 fund managers have a relatively lower experience of managing/co-managing funds below three years, the report added.
That said, women make up only about 9.81 per cent of the total number, and thus, still remain drastically underrepresented among the ranks of mutual fund managers, the report further said.
According to the report, women fund managers are currently managing about Rs 4.43 lakh crore, or 11.19 per cent of the total mutual fund assets, inclusive of all open- and closed-end assets.
From the perspective of assets managed across various asset classes in terms of weightage as a percentage of overall assets under management (AUM) managed by women, the largest chunk belonged to equity/growth asset (32.4 per cent), followed by allocation (29.3 per cent), and fixed income, excluding overnight, money market and liquid (19.9 per cent), and overnight, money market, and liquid (18.1 per cent).
The report further revealed that of the total open-ended assets managed by women fund managers, 82 per cent of the AUM outperformed the peer group average on a one-year basis, while 93 per cent of the AUM outperformed on a three-year basis, and 99 per cent of the AUM outperformed on a five-year basis.
“In terms of the quantum of assets, since the time we started publishing this report, every year, we witnessed a rise in the total assets managed by women. That trend changed this time around, as, for the first time, the total assets managed by women as of January 2023 fell in comparison with the previous year,” Morningstar said in its report.
“This dip could be attributed to two prominent names that exited the mutual fund – management industry last year—Ms. Swati Kulkarni (UTI MF) and Ms. Lakshmi Iyer (Kotak MF)—both of whom managed a fair amount of corpus among themselves,” the report further said.
Morningstar further said that there has been a consistent increase in the number of women fund managers ever since they started bringing out the report in 2017, when there were only 18 fund managers.
