Empowering the Next Generation of Young Women & Non-Binary Investment Professionals
with Izzy Davies, Paige Taylor, and Brooke Johnson
Mentoring Programme Team, GAIN UK
with Izzy Davies, Paige Taylor, and Brooke Johnson
Mentoring Programme Team, GAIN UK
GAIN — Girls Are INvestors — is a charity whose mission is to inspire and empower the next generation of women and non-binary investment professionals through learning, career development, and networking. Mentoring sits at the heart of GAIN’s annual internship programme, pairing students completing investment management internships with experienced industry professionals.
Before Mentorloop, GAIN introduced mentors and mentees manually, over email. It worked at a small scale, but as the internship programme grew past 100 interns a year, it became increasingly time-consuming and left the team with almost no visibility into whether relationships were actually working — whether mentor and mentee had even been in touch, let alone how the meetings were going. GAIN needed a more efficient system, but one thing was non-negotiable: they didn’t want to lose the personal touch that made mentoring meaningful.
Mentorloop gave GAIN that balance. Reporting made it possible to see who was talking to whom; private chat gave mentors and mentees a direct line to the team if issues came up; and the platform itself elevated the professionalism of the whole experience.
The results have compounded year over year. At the end of 2023, 63% of interns who’d been through the internship and mentoring programme were offered a subsequent internship or full-time role in investment management. The programme has since scaled to around 300 mentors supporting 700 girls, women, and non-binary students annually — with a goal of reaching 2,000 students by 2029.
This year marks a milestone: after years of matching manually in a spreadsheet even after adopting Mentorloop for communication, GAIN made full use of Mentorloop’s matching function for the first time.
"It saves us so much time and has made the whole process so much more efficient"
With over 100 interns to match each cycle, the shift freed the team to invest their energy elsewhere in the programme.
Retention tells its own story: 31% of this summer’s mentors are returning mentors, and 15 are GAIN alumni now mentoring the next cohort of interns — including one who joined in the very first Mentorloop-matched cohort, is now nearly three years into her investment management career, still checks in with her original mentor for CFA exam tips, and has gone on to win GAIN’s Alumni of the Year award. Mentoring quality has stayed consistently strong throughout, tracking between 4.4 and 4.6 out of 5 — participants aren’t just staying in touch to tick a box.
For Izzy Davies, the impact crystallised at last year’s intern networking event, watching one intern and her mentor describe how they meet up in person for walks instead of video calls.
"You could see the great bond they'd formed and how grateful the intern was for the support she was receiving. It's a great example of how mentoring goes beyond career advice. It builds genuine relationships, builds confidence, and gives our interns someone who is invested in their success."
Diversity isn’t an add-on for GAIN — it’s the point. In 2024, over 80% of interns came from ethnic minority backgrounds, and over 60% attended a state school or an independent school on a bursary. Mentors actively request to be matched with mentees from similar socio-economic backgrounds, in the belief that — as Brooke highlights — “if you can’t see her, you can’t be her.”
GAIN has three concrete moves planned. First, mentees will be matched with a second mentor — a former GAIN intern who interned at the same firm they’re heading to — giving them two sources of support from day one. Second, mentors will be encouraged to attend Mentorloop’s own training sessions, sharpening skills like communication and emotional intelligence they can carry into their own careers. Third, meeting ratings and feedback data will now formally power GAIN’s “Mentor of the Year” award at the annual GAIN Awards — turning a plan GAIN first floated in 2024 into a live part of how they recognise their best mentors.
Access remains the throughline: GAIN is pushing to reach more students at state schools, more applicants across every ethnic and social background, and to actively bust the myth that investment management requires a finance degree — matching interns with mentors who didn’t take the traditional path either.
Mentoring Programme Team at GAIN UK
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"Mentorloop has enabled us to scale our programs while retaining that personal element that makes mentoring experience so special."
– Mentoring Programme Team at GAIN UK
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