Hello and welcome to Top of the OPS, a podcast brought to you by
The Drawdown. Each episode we take a look at
private markets but from a slightly different angle, so
rather than be distracted by the latest deals done, we examine
the nuts and bolts of the market.
It's intrinsic architecture to reveal how private markets firms
really operate. My name is John Whitaker, I'm
the editor of The Drawdown and host for this episode where
we'll be looking at gender diversity and in particular the
role of family leave in reducing gender bias within the industry
and in attracting and retaining talent.
To help me untangle this naughty topic, I'm joined once again by
Tanya Kushal and Matthias Plotz, reporter and deputy editor at
The Drawdown respectively. How are you both?
Doing well. I'm a little bit surprised we
don't have any nicknames today. Yeah, I was going to say no
obscure nicknames today. John, are you OK?
Is everything all right at home? Well, what can I say, it's 2026,
new year, new me. They might return next episode,
we'll see. Anyway, we have limited time, so
let's turn to today's topic, which broaches gender diversity
in private markets. Tanya, you've been looking into
this actually recently, haven't you, for an article you've been
working on. And look, the research suggests
that we are still very far from seeing a level playing field
across the industry, right? Yes, that's exactly right.
And the story I'm working on looks at hostility and
discrimination more broadly, not just from a gender lens, because
gender often intersects with other areas.
And the main lead to the story was that there's a stack of
discrimination lawsuits against private equity firms that are
still alive. Yes, yeah.
And, and the concerns about inclusion go far beyond the
industry that we're concerned with.
Of course, my interest was piqued by a McKinsey report
which came out I think in December at the end of last
year, examining women in in corporate America or the, you
know, the, the, the representation of women in
corporate America more broadly. And it may for pretty Sabre
reading. Though the largest US firms have
modestly increased the proportion of senior roles held
by women, this report picked up that there's a clear trend of
scaling back diversity and inclusion programs and a
reduction in flexible working allowances that tend to, as we
know, disproportionately benefit women.
Such a stark contrast. So one of my best red cover
features for 2024 was a piece that I called Ecosystemic Change
about diversity and inclusion in private markets.
Specifically sort of looking at how firms from an operations
perspective, what frameworks they've come up with, what
strategies they've come up with to create an inclusive
environment, which then sort of should naturally foster
diversity. And at the time when I was
researching that, my sources said that USLPS asked way more
questions about DEI and collected more data points
within sort of the individual questions.
When you compare them to European LP's, they asked for
things like veteran status and disabilities.
Whereas for European LP's, as one source put it, diversity
sort of stops at white women. And it's only been a year and a
half since that cover feature came out, and that small part of
it, compared to the McKinsey report you mentioned reads like
a totally different world. We're going to turn our
attention to the main focus of today's podcast, which is
looking at the role of family leave within private markets
specifically as part of this wider conversation.
And to that end, we've invited Gopri Manki to talk to us.
She's the CEO of Level 20, which champions gender diversity in
private markets, and it has recently published a number of
reports looking at the impact of family lead policies across the
private markets industry. So let's hear from her now.
I'm delighted to welcome Gurpreet Manku to the podcast.
She is the CEO of Level 20, a not-for-profit organization
focused on improving gender diversity in private equity and
venture capital. Gurpreet began her career at
Deloitte before spending a decade at the recently renamed
BBCA, and she became Level 20 CEO in 2023.
Gurpreet, thank you for joining me.
Thank you for having me, it's great to be here.
Pleasure, right? So Level 20 published a pan
European report on family leave in private equity in 2024 and
then you followed that up last year with some country by
country analysis. Why did you want to research
this topic in so much detail? So family leave was a topic that
kept coming up in our conversations with members with
firms in the industry and it kept coming through in other
research we were doing specifically around the role of
family leave when it comes to attracting and retaining talent.
And a key finding in our work was that when you enable parents
to take time out of the business and come back into private,
which is typically a high, highly paced, high intensity
environment. And if you help them get back
into the deal flow and into that environment in a supportive way,
that will help with the retention of talent.
So we published this research to give our members and the
industry data to assist with their conversations and help
guide them with their policy development.
And the report set out information on leave offered,
leave taken and also some of the other support options out there.
Now our work has expanded, as you said, because there's been
demand to do more country specific work, but also to share
experiences and insights, both from individuals but also at a
firm level. So now we have this
complementary set of reports, guides, interviews, articles and
also events. So I guess the suggestion there
is that the level of knowledge, transparency and understanding
about what other firms are offering in the industry, it has
not always been there. And so actually part of the job
you're trying to fill in there is actually raise awareness of
where these policies have been really effective and and share
some of those stories, right? Yeah, absolutely.
The just being able to to understand what other firms in
your AUM banding other firms in the market are doing is also
helpful not just for the firms themselves, but for the people
that work there. And as you know, our our work
covered maternity leave, tend to leave and shared parental leave.
And what we did was not just publish the data, but publish
all the insights we had received through our feedback, whether it
was through focus groups, structured interviews and also
all our cumulative research that we've done to date.
So I think the hardest part was being able to just encapsulate
that and summarize that. But there was definitely a
thirst for further feedback on what the market was doing
because it is and has been an evolving area.
Yeah. And as you kind of highlighted
the the findings of your research suggests that family
policies have quite an effective defensive strategy for staff
retention, right. But do you think that the
leadership of PE firms should make more of an effort to
accurately weigh the cost of these policies against the cost
of replacing talent? Because that's where people's
minds go straight away when you talk about these things.
Is that the upfront costs of implementing them, right?
So my view is that firms do already view costs through the
lens of organizational resilience and retention of
talent as people are a crucial part of our business.
This is a people, people driven business.
Firms work really hard to bring talent in.
They're incredibly competitive as an industry.
And I know they've been investing in their approach to
talent management and family leave.
And we could see that in our data.
So 84% of the firms that we surveyed, and there were about
120 firms surveyed, had either recently reviewed or in the
process of reviewing their policies when it came to family
leave. When you think about costs, 80%
of the firms offered enhanced maternity pay and 74% of them
offered enhanced paternity leave.
And given the sort of number of European firms in our data set,
we also saw that 1/3 of firms equalized paternity leave with
maternity leave, and that's at the enhanced level.
So from a cost perspective, you know, my view is that firms have
already been thinking about it and against some of the benefits
that having, you know, a more inclusive culture has.
Yeah. And it's interesting you say
that about the offering that the ultimate enhanced kind of
package where you've equalized between paternity and and
maternity, because I guess there's, there's offering it and
then there's having a culture within firms where people
actually take it up, right. And my, you know, my perception
is that actually the take up rate is still relatively limited
for those kind of extended packages.
And, and obviously this isn't just related to this industry.
So I think the latest UK statistics say show just 5% of
eligible men used the government's official share
parental leave scheme, right. And you argue that normalizing
paternity leave is key to creating the inclusive culture.
But how much can private markets firms do themselves to increase
the the take up by men when more broadly there's challenges in in
in winning that argument? So I think this situation is is
evolving. I think it's moving.
Our research showed firms had increased the overall offer when
it came to paternity leave and 1/3 of firms had equalized
paternity leave with maternity. So the question is around take
up. Now we knew a lot of men were
interested in in the topic as well because level 20 is an open
network and we know based on the feedback that we've received
since the report was published nearly two years ago that men
have also been using it in their discussions.
And when we speak to firms, we hear that more men at junior and
mid level are also starting to take up the leave from paternity
leave and shared parental leave. So you might see some changes in
those numbers next time we publish this report.
One firm said to me that they were encouraging the men in
their team to take leave. So when the first woman had a
child, it was just past practice and precedence.
It wasn't a big deal, which I thought was quite nice.
What Level 20 can do is share data, but we can also share
feedback from people around their own experience and we've
been quite keen to showcase the examples of senior men.
So that's an MD or partner level, talking about their
experiences, taking potential shared parental leave, talking
about how it impacted their career.
You've got examples where people were promoted once, once they
got back from leave, but also, but mostly it was just about how
they do it. So I think just increasing
visibility on how parents are juggling their family
responsibilities with their work responsibilities, how their
firms have supported them is really is really helpful because
like I said, I think this is an evolving picture.
You note it's not just unique to our industry.
And what we can do is just give that forum for parents to talk
about how they're managing it in our events.
We've been running through our events series, sorry, we've been
running parental coffee clubs on Friday mornings, which has been
really popular. And that's not just for and the
core private industry will involve some of our associate
members, law firm partners and and so forth.
And it's just a nice opportunity for people to get together and
share tips with each other, whether it's around childcare
providers and and other other suggestions.
And what's also coming through in the discussions that we're
having is that this isn't just about children, because we're
that generation who have elderly parents now as well.
And that is starting to come through into conversations.
We are busy people. We care about our careers.
We're quite committed to the work that we do.
So question is about how do you manage periods of leave, could
be to look after children, It could be to look after other
relatives and then get back into the the workplace afterwards.
So it's an ongoing conversation and I expect to see movement on
it in in future years. Yeah, it's, it's really
interesting speaking around this because I guess you look at kind
of wider reporting around kind of DNI issues from a global
perspective. And obviously you, you know,
you, you can't, you know, avoid kind of the, the levels of kind
of push back and animosity towards those types of things
that you see, particularly in the US and, and, and you can get
in position where you worry about how much that kind of
changes the discourse at, at coming global level.
But it seems like you're from your experience, Pete, speaking
to people within the industry that you're still seeing
progression in this. You're not seeing a regression
at all and and firms are still committed to being, you know,
you know, a great number of firms looking to enhance their
packages and hopefully a greater number of individuals being
interested in in in taking up those opportunities as well.
We're definitely hearing that through our conversations.
And when we look at back at the the Pan European report, most of
the data actually came from firms that were headquartered in
the UK or headquartered in the rest of Europe.
And then what was really interesting was the, the level
of maternity leave offered was fairly consistent.
But like we were saying that the parental, the paternity leave
sorry offering was it was typically more for those
European headquartered firms. When you look at the data set,
actually so many of the firms had offices throughout the world
and around 40% of them were developing their family leave
policies with local country input.
So those perceptions of fairness across offices are taken into
account. But when it comes to country
specific dynamics, I think that's why we've been investing
in further work in country because it's also social norms
and market practice that come into play.
I think this is an ongoing conversation, right?
The picture is involved, evolving.
So what's really helpful for forums at level 20 is to bring
people together. So we'll have the data analysis,
but what's often more helpful is the conversation around how
people are are approaching it. And there's quite a lot of
variability, but there's also a lot of commonality.
And I can't sit here and say to you, these types of firms do
this thing and this type of firm approaches it this way because
in practice it's quite broad and it's often dependent on on the
individual as well. Yeah.
But so, yeah, it's, it's a mixed picture, but essentially you're
saying you're, you're you're positive about kind of the
direction of travel and, and, and what you're reading from the
data. One thing before we move on to
the final question. I just intrigued about those,
those parent sessions, parent coffee mornings that's not
parent and baby copy mornings. OK, yeah, I was just checking.
Yeah, yeah. As an alternative to doing kind
of baby yoga or something, you could come and yeah.
To the level 20 every quarter the team will try and find a a
coffee spot on a Friday and it's usually from 10 so you can drop
the older kids off 1st from 10. And it's just just around
London, so where people typically live as opposed to
central London. So those those sessions are
quite nice. Babies are definitely welcome
that they do very well on social media.
OK, yeah, I bet, I bet. OK, so before.
We send you an invite to. Them.
No, please do Yeah, I'll bring my daughter along yeah.
So kind of moving on to the final question I had to you.
I thought it was really interesting.
You say it's a mixed pitch here right.
So I think your research suggests that there's a gap
between perception and reality when it it comes to the typical
family leave packages across the industry, because you found that
46 and believe their policies are are the same as their
competitors. And yet there's actually huge
variance, right, in terms of of what is actually offered.
So do you think, and obviously, I imagine you will be supportive
of this idea because that's, you know, what level 20 does.
But do you recognize that there's more work to be done in
terms of better comms on this issue and actually more of a
role for firms who have embraced this to to be more of champions
of, you know, offering enhanced pack of family packages and, and
promoting the the benefits that that they derive from them?
I was. Starting to see the promotion of
the packages offered before anyway.
But once the research was published, accompanied by case
studies, interviews, we could, we could see it was helping with
the broader conversation because it was the first time such a
broad data set had been published.
So firms probably didn't have access to that information
before. They probably didn't really know
or they might have had quite a small sample to figure out if
they were in line with their peer group.
And the feedback that I've been getting at a firm level has been
that this has been incredibly helpful to them.
I've had people come to me and say that their firm has changed
their policy. I they've enhanced that the
policy further and, and you know, long may that continue.
We will revise that European data set in a couple of years
time, but for now, we're continuing to work on it at a
country level. And on the championing front, I
think the interviews that we've been doing have been incredibly
helpful because they're giving personal perspectives and at the
end of the day, that's what people want to hear.
So how did she do it? She's a partner, she's got three
kids. How did she do it?
How does he do it? He, you know, he's the head of a
head of a region for his firm and how does he juggle it with
two, two sons? And the, and all our
interviewees have been very honest about how they've
approached things. They've and I think that's
what's, what's what's been received so well by our network.
So we'll keep doing that. You know, we call it the
Printing in PE series. But you know, other, other
sectors also also welcome. I think just getting out more
feedback helps because sometimes you don't know what you could be
doing or what you should be doing because as you can
appreciate, some of the firms in this industry are still quite
small organizations. Yeah.
And even the the very large ones are still still quite relatively
small compared to other bigger markets out there.
So bigger companies out there rather.
So I think just having more feedback and people sharing
their perspectives really helps. Yeah.
And it's, you know, here at the drawdown, we're very conscious
of someone like ACFO quite often has to manage various different,
you know, functions within P firms, quite often the HR
function as well. And so for them, any kind of
information being able to benchmark against other firms as
you say similar AUM how people are are dealing with this and
hearing success stories is, is you know going to be really
valuable to them as well. I think the one data point that
really helped this conversation, certainly from my perspective,
was we were for the first time be able to quite clearly say
that women in deal teams who'd gone on maternity leave were
still with their firms three years later because there was a
perception that women were having children leaving.
And that wasn't true. That wasn't that wasn't the case
in our data proved that nothing, just even having that data point
out there was incredibly helpful.
Because then it goes back to your point about investing in in
the processes, the coaching, taking the time out to do kid
days properly. You know, thinking about, you
know, the whole period of leave and the return, return from
leave as well. And it is all it all seems to be
going in the right direction. OK, well, look, I think as you
say, your research will continue.
It'd be brilliant to kind of circle back on this when the
next time your report on this comes out and we can compare the
data. And hopefully, as you know,
you're, you seem to be sensing we will see further progress in
this area. And in the meantime, I might see
you at the the next parenting coffee morning.
Yeah. That'll be brilliant.
Thank you. OK.
Well, yeah. Thank you so much for coming on
the podcast, Gurpreet. Thank you for having me.
Great to hear from Gurpreet there.
And I've got to say I was pleasantly surprised by the
level of positivity in her responses.
And I, I guess you know, there's, there is that general
fear that we may be going backwards slightly on some of
these issues. So to hear that in the research
that they've done, things are moving in a positive direction
in terms of packages offered by firms in Europe and also in
terms of the take up rate. And obviously, you know, they
are trying to do a lot of to to support that and, and promote an
advocate for it. It's probably the point in the
podcast where I should confess that I have, you know, somewhat
of a maybe not vested interest, but a bias here and that I, I
took shared parental leave myself when my, when my daughter
was born. And you know, I, I'm a huge
advocate for it. I think, you know, from a
selfish perspective, you know, I found the, the experience, you
know, hugely educational and valuable and a wonderful period
of time that I spent with my daughter.
But also I think it's an important thing for for men to
try and step up and do. And, you know, it's not just
obviously it's not just for our benefit, but to more normalize
it. Ultimately is is is to the
benefit of to to women in in society as well.
Yeah, well, my parents took shared parental leave when I was
born. I mean, they did have the
advantage that they were both government employees and they of
course get more benefits. But if I remember correctly,
during my high school time, my mom took another round of like
family leave or like parental leave again, just to help me
because I was like really stressed out and need help with
my A levels. So she took some time off and,
and she said she could do that until I was 18.
And that's quite interesting that, you know, parents should
be able to take care of their kids at every second point in
their life, not just when they're born.
And I think that's also another concept that firms should look
into. And and Matthias, out of one of
our recent events, right, we were hearing similar arguments
in a closed door session, right? Yeah, actually.
So the the conversation just now reminded me of two points that
was raised at the last operational leaders Summit in in
Portugal last year. And one of them was when it
comes to the broader discussion around talent and especially how
you retain talent, there's obviously always a financial
package conversation to be had around that.
And particularly for the smaller firms, there is often a worry
that they simply cannot compete on compensation packages with
larger firms. That is just not on the table.
Their pockets aren't that deep. But the point was made that
creating very strong policies or empowering policies for your
employees around things like parental leave is one way of
retaining staff in the long term.
And I thought another point that was made, which I thought was
very interesting was that having policies and especially policies
that in the past maybe have been there but haven't necessarily
that the take up hasn't been great.
Let's say for example, parental leave, which I think
historically parental leave. So for fathers hasn't really
that take up hasn't been great. So what they have done is
they've actively encouraged the senior male staff members to
whom the situation was applicable, of course, to go and
take parental leave. Because that kind of ingrains it
for one in a company culture, but also signals to everyone
down the food chain that it is OK to take that leave.
And for lack of better words, your career will still be there
when you come back. I think this is a conversation
we can carry on for quite a while, right?
It's just going to be interesting to see how these
policies expand and, and, and evolve over time.
And I think as Gurpreet suggested, they'll be doing
their own research, repeating it in the next couple of years, so
we can compare and contrast and see whether her, her
expectations of things continue to improve are borne out by the
data, right. So before we leave, guys, it's
your opportunity to have a little plug of articles that
you're working on at the moment. So Tanya, can I ask you first
just to give our listeners a little sneak peek into things
that you're working on at the moment?
Of course. So kind of staying on topic, I
am looking at hostility against women and anybody not male and
not white in the private equity world.
And what why is that still happening?
So apart from that, I am looking at also the European way of
doing GP stakes. So that's another interesting
one. Great.
OK, Matthias, how about you? So I've been tasked, we're
writing the first sort of cover feature of the year, which is
going to be looking at the question of what should or what
could count as a fund cost. And I'm really sinking my teeth
into that right now. The other one that I've got
coming up is I'm looking into the challenges and hopefully
couple of solutions around running multi currency funds
which you often use to broaden your appeal to to multiple
investors by making the investments available in
different currencies. And then I've also got a couple
of entries in our ongoing profile series coming up and I
think that's that's it for the moment.
Yeah, to catch up on all of that great content which is going to
be coming very soon, make sure to check out the Drawdown
website. In the meantime, it just leaves
us to say thank you to all of you for listening.
Thank you to Matthias and Tanya for helping me out.
Thank you very much. Well, thank you for having me.
Yeah. And of course, thank you for
Geoffrey for being our guest on this episode.
Until next time, see you later.