The National Association of Investment Companies is on its way to creating "a pipeline of women of color" for the private equity and hedge fund industries, a stated goal for its inaugural summer internship program.
While women accounted for 20.3% of all people employed at alternative investment firms at the end of 2020, only 12.2% of senior executives and 6.6% of board members are female, according to Preqin data.
"The NAIC is proud to lead the way and blaze a trail for the next generation of female leaders in alternative investments with this program," said Carmen Ortiz-McGhee, NAIC's chief operating officer, in a news release.
And the 50-year-old Washington-based trade association for diverse- and women-owned private equity and hedge funds did it with a little help from its friends.
Assisting NAIC on the program called the "NAIC Paradigm Changers" are the American Investment Council, the Robert Toigo Foundation and alternative investment firms IMB Partners, Palladium Equity Partners LLC and TPG. AIC and Toigo helped place interns with more than a dozen NAIC and AIC member firms. AIC and the three alternative investment firms will each be taking on an intern.
There are 16 pre-MBA, graduate and undergraduate students from a diverse cross-section of backgrounds, experiences and majors in Paradigm's first class of interns. They include Lillian Murtonen, who is working on a bachelor's degree in narrative studies at the University of Southern California and is AIC's intern; Colby Baylor, who is pursuing a bachelor's in marketing at the Ohio State University and is interning at TPG; and Norquata Allen, who has a bachelor's in aerospace engineering and is pursuing an MBA at Harvard Business School. Ms. Allen is Apollo Global Management Inc.'s intern.
