Cathie Wood's career advice for women: 'Make your boss look brilliant'

• Ark Invest's Cathie Wood has advised women how to get ahead in the financial services industry.
• She told TIME: "Work hard, keep your head down, and make your boss look brilliant."

Women working in financial services should make their bosses "look brilliant" if they want to get ahead, the veteran investor Cathie Wood has said.

However, in an interview with TIME, published Sunday, the founder and CEO of Ark Invest advised women to leave their jobs if their bosses didn't give them "growth opportunities."

Wood, who founded Ark in 2014, is one of a handful of women to lead a high-profile asset management firm. A favorite among followers of the subreddit r/WallStreetBets, she shot to fame after making successful bets on Tesla and bitcoin.

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Asked about the lack of women working in the upper echelons of the financial services industry, Wood told TIME: "As far as my own experience and advice, it has been: work hard, keep your head down, make your boss look brilliant."

She added: "If your boss does not give you growth opportunities, I would then suggest leaving and getting into a [better] situation. Because I really do think our industry is fantastic for women."

A 2021 study by Knight Foundation found that just 1.4% of an estimated $82.24 trillion of assets under management were handled by a female- or minority-led firm. Ingrained stigmas and structural societal inequalities were some of the barriers found to be behind the "glass ceiling" that exists in many industries.

Wood said asset management can be a "wonderful" industry for women if they can move into a situation where their performance is measured objectively. The way to do this is to move into asset management positions, like portfolio manager and research analyst, she suggested.