Top Women Wealth Advisors of 2021 – Celebrating CEPA Women in Finance

Last week we shared a trivia poll on our LinkedIn to our network of professional advisors and business owners. We were interested to see who in our community knew how many Certified Exit Planning Advisors were included in the 1,000 Women named on Forbes “America’s Top Women Wealth Advisors” List for 2021. Here are the results.

33% said 10 Women CEPAs were included
33% said 15 Women CEPAs were included
33% said 25 Women CEPAs were included

The correct answer is 15 CEPAs were included in this prestigious list.

Exit Planning Institute President, Scott Snider, says, “As we build the exit planning community by educating professional advisors through our CEPA Program, I found it incredibly motivating to find that 15 CEPAs were included in Forbes and Shook Research “Top Women Wealth Advisors of 2021” list. That is over 1%. And for a newer growing organization I would call it a win. EPI will grow to 10,000 CEPAs in the marketplace over the next three years. CEPAs advise business owners on how to grow significant value in their companies while aligning their personal and financial goals.”

Join us in congratulating the following CEPAs:
Ileana Dominguez
Judy A. Fredrickson
Leslie Lauer
Corina Davis
Kellie Sheryak
Katherine Larsen
Paula Bright Connell
Laura Wile Wellon
Rupa Jack
Lori Siegel
Heather Goodbody
Ellen Rankin
Natalie Barron
Rebecca Glasgow
Carol Mani Johnston


Women in Business – Our Hope for the Future

In the banking and financial industries in general, “women are just at parity (50%) for entry level positions, but a gender gap gradually increases along the leadership pipeline, from 42% of managers to 27% of senior vice presidents”, according to a study by Catalyst. In a research study conducted by McKinsey in 2019, “For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 85 women were promoted—and this gap was even larger for some women: only 58 Black women and 71 Latinas were promoted. As a result, women remained significantly outnumbered in entry-level management at the beginning of 2020—they held just 38% of manager-level positions, while men held 62%”. While more women have been hired to entry level positions in recent years, the difficulty to advance in their careers to management positions remains, especially for women of color.

Scott Snider says, “Women CEPAs tend to kick some ass inside of the EPI Community”. In reviewing our CEPA Community, nearly 50% of our Faculty are women, 20% of our Chapter Presidents Circle are women. When looking across the entire CEPA Community, 20% of CEPAs are women. Roughly 40% of all CEPAs are financial advisors. Running with some of the similar numbers, let’s assume those numbers stay consistent. That means that at 10,000 CEPAs, 2,000 would be women and likely 40% of them would be financial advisors or 800 female financial advisor CEPAs.

This could mean that 80 of those CEPAs have the potential to make this Forbes America’s Top Women Wealth Advisors list of 2024! But is this good enough? Should it be more? Can we push to 30% of CEPAs are women?