Patricia Lizarraga knows she needs to increase the assets of her firm’s $3.9 million Hypatia Women CEO ETF to give it any chance of hitting institutional investors’ radar screens.
And she’s also sure of something else: There aren’t enough women portfolio managers.
Hypatia Capital Management, the ETF’s investment adviser, is hiring for the role of portfolio manager and head of investor relations, according to a Nov. 11 email from its parent company, Hypatia Capital Group, which Lizarraga founded in 2007. Lizarraga, managing partner of Hypatia Capital, has managed the Hypatia Women CEO ETF since it began operations in 2023.
“We are especially excited to be able to offer the title of portfolio manager of a NYSE-listed fund,” the email said. “We know this title is difficult to obtain, and there are too few women in this role in the financial services industry.”
The ETF, which trades under the ticker symbol WCEO, is an actively managed fund that seeks to invest at least 80% of its net assets in equity securities of U.S. companies led by a female CEO, according to its prospectus.
“We are an ETF, and we need to scale our assets,” Lizarraga said in an interview. “We’re at sub-scale right now.”
Consequently, institutions like endowments and foundations can’t invest in WCEO “because they say we’re too small,” she said.
“So, in order to scale our ETF, we need to do personal outreach because the wealth management firms will not let us on their platforms until we’re larger,” Lizarraga said.
Because the most likely way for WCEO to gain assets is via in-person investor meetings or speaking engagements at industry events, “we need to add an investor relations person to our team,” she said. Hypatia also wanted that investor relations person to understand and “be an integral part of our product,” which spurred it to add the portfolio manager title, Lizarraga said.
The email described the role as “best suited for a financial services professional who may have left the workforce for some time due to personal reasons, and is looking for a re-entry point with meaningful responsibilities….”
Research has shown that women typically bear much more responsibility than men when it comes to caring for children and elderly family members, she said.
“And that affects their career and that affects the retirement gap that exists in the United States where men retire with significantly more assets than women, and so we’re trying to address that,” Lizarraga said.
While women tend to be the ones whose careers are interrupted by such family responsibilities, Hypatia welcomes men to apply for the role as well, she said.
“Just like I don’t like a world that’s 95% men CEOs, I wouldn’t want a world that was 95% women CEOs either,” she said.
