OneAmerica Financial Partners Inc. and Broadridge Financial Solutions Inc. recently announced a collaboration to provide 30 female financial advisers with free training for the Accredited Investment Fiduciary designation.

The OneAmerica Financial Female Retirement Professionals Program is being led by Sandy McCarthy, president of Retirement Services at OneAmerica Financial, with the goal of elevating women in the financial services industry.

“Broadridge reached out to us and said, ‘We’re really excited about what you’re doing in this space,’” McCarthy says. “We met and spoke about ways that we can make a difference. They provided us the opportunity to provide AIF training and it struck a chord with us.”

McCarthy and the organizations are launching the program to put money and real-world certification toward the under-representation of women in the financial sector. As the executive wrote in PLANADVISER last year, women make up about half of the U.S. population, but are estimated at being around just 30% of the financial adviser community, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The program offers two paths for individuals to choose from when training for the AIF designation. The first option is a self-paced online course, which offers on-demand curriculum for completion within 180 days. The alternative is an instructor-led virtual option, which includes five days of two-hour sessions in a virtual classroom.

McCarthy says the goal is to draw female advisers who want accreditation but may be stymied by cost and time constraints. Currently, she says there aren’t any criteria other than interest level.

“We’ll start with 30 [advisers] and then we’ll see how it goes,” she says. “If there’s more opportunity, we’ll again work with Broadridge to see how we might be able to embark on additional accreditations, so this is a start for us. We’d like to see how important [accreditation is] in terms of the career progression and the career opportunity that women now can take on.”

The demand for trained female advisers is underscored by research indicating that about 70% of women seeking financial guidance prefer working with female advisers. Moreover, recent studies by the Nationwide Retirement Institute highlight a troubling gender gap in retirement planning.

A significant proportion of women (23%) express concerns about their retirement trajectory, compared to only 15% of men. Women exhibit more apprehensions than men about finances, with 41% expressing a negative or neutral sentiment toward their retirement planning, in contrast to 29% of men. Despite women’s active participation in workplace retirement plans, which is similar to men’s, they are less likely to have achieved savings milestones, including building emergency savings, according to the institute.

Consequently, over half of women worry about outliving their retirement income. A substantial majority of women (75%) desire a pension-like income from their 401(k) plans, and the vast majority (90%) would consider rolling over their funds into such solutions if provided.

McCarthy says OneAmerica and Broadridge’s new program will empower female advisers in their careers, who can, in turn, help other women with saving for retirement.

“There’s a lot of great programs out there so I’m not going to say ours it better or equal than [them]. I think our approach is much more around being action-oriented and targeted holistically with female advisers in mind,” she says. “We have a collection of training such as the designations, personal branding, communication and presentation skills. They’re focused on the research that we did around the [four] Cs: confidence, community, connection and culture. That’s our differentiator. It’s focused on the four components.”