Sonal Desai, executive vice president and chief investment officer for Franklin Templeton Fixed Income, who oversees $200 billion in assets under management, spent a formative six years as an economist at the International Monetary Fund from 1994 to 2000.
She said her experience at the IMF was crucial as it allowed her to understand how economic policies are formulated and their direct impact on the real world — something that helps her anticipate the likely path and repercussions of economic policies on markets. Before her tenure at the IMF she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh. She ultimately joined Franklin Templeton in 2009 and assumed her current role in 2018.
Desai said in her career she has seen women make progress into the top ranks of asset management, but thinks that clearly more progress is still needed.
“We should not lose sight of the fact that women have indeed made significant advances in this field and will continue to do so,” she said.
While mentorship of younger women already in the industry will be crucial to the future, Desai points out that in order to maintain a strong pipeline of female talent, firms should reach out to female students as early as high school in order to encourage them to consider finance and asset management as careers.
“This remains a male-dominated field, and I do often find myself as the only woman in a room,” she said. “However, in these occasions I don’t think of myself as a woman and the other people as men — rather, I see myself as an investment professional talking with clients or colleagues.”
Desai also suspects that some young women might not consider finance/asset management as “meaningful” careers.
“We need to change this mindset,” she said. “Helping to secure a stable retirement for people by protecting the value of their savings has a lot of meaning — we need to do better at explaining this to younger generations.”