The role of gender norms within independent financial advice

Financial advice has gained importance in asset-based welfare systems, yet it continues to operate within professional cultures shaped by masculine-coded practices. While existing scholarship has documented occupational segregation and gendered outcomes in financial advice, it often treats gender and gender capital as fixed attributes, underestimating how advisors can consciously navigate and reshape gendered habitus. This paper moves beyond such framings by demonstrating how financial advice is not merely a site where gendered inequalities are reproduced but also one where they are negotiated and, at times, transformed. Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with independent financial advisors, the study develops an analytical framework that integrates Bourdieu’s concept of habitus with a ‘doing/undoing gender’ lens and recent theorizing on variegated subjectivities. The analysis demonstrates that advisors employ differentiated strategies, seeking to transform gendered habitus through four different approaches, even as industry logics constrain these efforts. By conceptualizing habitus as fragmented, evolving, and mediated through individualized and socialized subjectivities, the paper advances debates on gender and finance, offering insights into how professional practices simultaneously challenge and reinforce gendered inequalities.