Morningstar - Q1 2020 - 70

Investors

Bringing to Light
A leader in ESG, Sonya Dreizler starts
a #MeToo movement in financial services.

USER PROFILE

Charles Keenan

Early in her career, Sonya Dreizler saw the
ugly side of financial services while attending her
first industry conference. In the span of
her trip, she was invited to go upstairs to a fellow
attendee's hotel room, propositioned at
a networking event, and asked to go along to
a business meeting at a strip club.
For Dreizler, who now serves as a consultant
to financial-services firms on environmental, social,
and governance, or ESG, investing, those
types of incidents accumulated over her career.
A decade and a half after that first conference,
Dreizler acted to address a big problem in the field.
Spurred on by the #MeToo movement,
Dreizler posted a call last March on Twitter to
collect the stories of other women.
In the first 24 hours, dozens of women sent her
their own stories; texts and Twitter direct messages streamed in from work friends, and email
messages arrived from acquaintances and
strangers. The missives would serve as fuel for
a nascent #MeToo movement in financial services.
"I thought, 'Oh, women want these stories
heard,'" Dreizler says. "What I have heard from
other women feels cathartic and healing."
Do Better
The stories keep arriving. Many of the women's
experiences served as the basis for a 10-part
series on her website she calls "Do Better," which
illustrates the depth of the problems of sexual
harassment, discrimination, and assault in financial
services. It tackles topics such as unchecked bad

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behavior at conferences, pervasive gender-based
discrimination, racism, lack of action after reporting
incidents, and female attrition in the industry.
At the same time, the women writing to Dreizler
also describe their fear of backlash for speaking
out. Some women phoned her, out of fear of
putting anything in writing. One created an
anonymous Twitter account to tell her tale. Others
said they couldn't share their stories because
they had signed nondisclosure or nondisparage
agreements. And for her own outspokenness,
Dreizler has been trolled on Twitter.
"Women want to be heard, believed, and valued,"
Dreizler says. "That is not happening in financial
services right now."
There's a long way to go by one measure:
59% of female advisors say harassment of women
is "somewhat or very common" in the industry
compared with only 27% of men, according to a
recent poll of 1,350 respondents conducted
by Investment Advisor magazine. Conversely, 73%
of male advisors say physical harassment
of women is "uncommon or nonexistent" versus
41% of women.
Embracing Empowerment
Inequality is something Dreizler, 40, saw from
an early age growing up in Sacramento, Calif. Her
mother, Bella Dreizler, a physical therapist,
asked for a 12% raise and equity participation to be
on equal footing with her male peers. Her boss
said no. So, she left and started her own practice,
Dreizler Physical Therapy, which she sold in
2005. Her success resonated with her daughter.

After graduating college, she found her first job
in the financial-services industry in 2004 as

an executive assistant for the chief executive officer
at Protected Investors of America, a broker/dealer
and Registered Investment Advisor firm. (Her
father, Bob Dreizler, also worked at the firm as an
advisor.) Her female boss quickly gave her
responsibilities and an open invitation to ask as
many questions as she liked. Dreizler embraced the
empowerment and became chief operating
officer in less than six years. She gives some credit
to her boss: "She took a chance on me and
gave me a lot of interesting and challenging work."
In 2015, Dreizler took over the role of chief
executive herself. One of her accomplishments
included developing a speaker series on
ESG investing to promote conversation on impact
investing within the San Francisco Bay Area
financial professional community. Dreizler also
oversaw the company's search for a buyer and left
the firm after it struck a deal to move under
the umbrella of Cambridge Investment Research.
She pondered her next move. While over the years
she had obtained several securities licenses
and became a Certified Financial Planner, she knew
that advising wasn't for her. (She has since let
the licenses lapse and recently resigned her CFP.)
She loved running a business and serving advisors,
and impact and sustainable investing appealed
to her. At Protected Investors, many of the advisors
focused on sustainable investing. One of those
was her father, who she said was one of the
first financial planners in the United States to focus
on green investing back in the 1980s.
Pursuing ESG
Dreizler also had a lifelong interest in the environment, sparked by the problem of smog in the
Central Valley. When she was 8, she wrote a book
for a school project about a woman who
invented a car that ran on smog, cleaning the air
and putting fossil fuel automakers out of business.

In real life, she started a company of her own,
Solutions With Sonya, consulting with RIAs, mutual
funds, custodians, and financial tech firms
trying to advance themselves in the ESG marketplace. She helps institutions devise processes
and educational content for their advisors. Her
work with advisors includes producing messaging
and content such as newsletters.

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