Tanya Staples has plenty to celebrate this holiday season.
The professor of financial planning & research at Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning’s School of Business earned her Ph.D. in personal financial planning at Kansas State University after successfully defending her dissertation in October.
I first got to know Staples 25 years ago, while she was vice-president, business development and client relations at Corporate Benefit Analysts, a group benefits and retirement advisory firm in Kitchener, Ont., that was acquired by NFP in 2018. I was editor of Benefits Canada in those days, covering the employer-sponsored benefits, pensions and institutional investment industry.
In a business full of smart people, Staples stood out as a promising young leader. Even early in her career, she showed both confidence and curiosity. She knew enough to know she could spend the rest of her career learning.
A quarter century later, she’s become an important thought leader in Canadian and U.S. financial planning circles. In addition to her work at Conestoga College, Staples serves FP Canada as a member of its Competency Review Task Force, Educator Advisory Panel and . She is a member of the
Staples’ thesis, Exploring Gender Differences in Retirement Preparedness Behaviours in Canada: A Health Belief Model Approach to Understanding Perceived Motivators, Barriers and Behavioural Moderators, examines women’s unique financial challenges.
“Canadian women are plagued by unique financial challenges such as lower earnings levels, disrupted career patterns, investment risk aversion, lower financial knowledge, increased longevity and increased incidents of financial insecurity,” she writes in her abstract.
Those challenges will be familiar to advisors who serve female clients. But women working in the industry face their own barriers, Staples told me.
“There are real structural issues,” she said.
Men spend more time at work, for example. “They aren’t balancing as many of the primary caregiving duties as women are,” Staples said. “Women are simply out of sight, out of mind more often and therefore may not be able to advocate as well from a promotional perspective.”
Professional networking — something women value as much as men do — is often scheduled around breakfasts or after-hours events. That can be difficult to balance for women with caregiving responsibilities.
Men and women think about job opportunities differently too. “Women don’t apply for positions until they know they are fully qualified, whereas men are more likely to apply when they may not have all the credentials.”
Parenting decisions can leave women out of more than just career advancement. They’re less able to accumulate wealth for long-term goals like retirement — a cruel irony for women in the financial planning industry.
Staples shared a bit of what she’s heard from women advisors who struggle with lost commission revenue when they’re on leave.
“It’s very unattractive,” she said. “There were women in one project that we did that were back to work two weeks after having a child. I don’t know how your brain functions. I don’t know how you physically recover from such an undertaking.”
Beyond the obvious equity concerns, these issues also make it harder for firms to retain women clients, many of whom prefer female advisors. Staples said executives recognize the problem is unsustainable but struggle to find female talent.
“There aren’t women in the pipeline,” she said.
That, Staples said, is the call to action.
“I think we can add significant value and encourage more women into the profession by simply letting people know that this is a helping, guiding, advice profession,” she said.
Staples is optimistic that as the industry becomes more holistic and client-centric, more women will recognize that the job is no longer what it once was — and that’s a good thing.
“You don’t have to be selling product every time you open your mouth,” she said.
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