Darden’s Alumni Spotlight recently featured Marcia Mao (MBA ’15), director of portfolio management at Zenity Capital in Beijing, for her momentous rise to a top position in the male-dominated private equity industry.
Her rise in the private equity industry is unique. According to a 2017 report from data provider Prequin, women held just 18 percent of investment positions in global private equity, which is less than venture capital firms and hedge funds….She believes the lack of gender diversity is a problem for private equity firms because an abundance of research has proven that diverse perspectives yield alpha. A report from the International Finance Corporation found that investment funds with gender-balanced senior teams achieved 10–20 percent higher returns than unbalanced teams, for example.
Marcia recognized the impact Darden made on her career journey through the many lessons she learned through Darden’s cases and case method style of teaching, as well as her diverse cohort of MBA classmates.
The program allowed her to develop cross-cultural collaboration and problem solving skills, which are important in global finance, dealing with diverse clients and complex problems….“The learning agility that the Darden case method gave me is enormous, making me unafraid of picking up any new field.” says Mao.
Read Marcia’s full profile on Darden’s Alumni Spotlight.
