A new club has emerged in the Tippie College of Business. InvestHer, a business organization that aims to create a network of women in finance, launched just a few weeks ago. After I spoke with the cofounders of the organization and two faculty members from the Finance Department, I realized that InvestHer is a student organization that Tippie has desperately needed.

Jenna Pokorny and Maeve McGonigal are both seniors in Tippie majoring in finance. Pokorny said there wasn’t a specific event she can remember that triggered her to start InvestHer. Rather, “as I got more and more into my finance courses, the more and more I looked around the room and saw fewer and fewer women — I realized this could be a platform for women to push past the barrier.”

McGonigal agreed, saying, “Sometimes, I go around and count the women in the room.” She believes it’s more about the feeling that one gets; no one outright says people can’t go into finance because they are women, but finance is not associated with being a woman’s job and McGonigal thinks that women may not be thinking finance is a job they could do.

Both McGonigal and Pokorny stressed that Tippie and the Finance Department have never discriminated against them or made them feel as though they couldn’t be in finance because they are women.

Over the past three years, the percentage of women in Tippie has hovered right around 35 percent. When you break this down by major, finance has consistently ranked as the major with the lowest percentage of women with only 27, 30, and 24 percent women in 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively.

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It’s not just the UI that struggles with its representation of women in finance; it’s an industry-wide problem that many are fighting to change.

It all boils down to whether people can see themselves thriving in their jobs. Is there room for improvement? Have other people like me succeeded before? Despite women making up a large proportion of finance-related roles, Spencer Stuart and Fortune report only 12.5 percent of CFOs in Fortune 500 companies are women, which makes it difficult to see a career path that leads to equal outcomes for men and women. When people can’t find role models who look like them who have had success in a particular area, that very well can deter people from pursing that career.

Jon Garfinkel, who has been at the UI for almost 20 years and is a professor of finance, stressed the importance of women taking leadership roles in the finance major at Tippie.

“When you see somebody who looks like you in a position, it is an example of what is possible. Having more women in finance, talking about finance, learning about it together are examples we have not seen enough of.”

Garfinkel noted that the best thing Tippie has done to encourage more women to pursue finance is moving Professor Catherine Zaharis to the undergraduate side of the Finance Department.

Zaharis said the finance industry is riddled with people trying to figure out why more women do not pursue finance. In our conversation, Zaharis said you can’t be what you haven’t seen: “I don’t think you see a lot of finance roles — you might think you don’t belong or you go into a classroom and you are one of the few women in the class, and it’s intimidating sometimes.”

Women sometimes opt out even if they are capable of the doing well in finance jobs.

Zaharis said she has been to countless meetings in which she is the only woman in the room; InvestHer is a group that gives women an opportunity to get their foot in the door, “and then you can make it.”

The general consensus is we don’t quite know why women don’t go into finance. Everyone I have talked to agreed that finance is perceived as a male-dominated field. And they’re right. Finance is dominated by men in the industry, especially in upper-level roles. I wrote this expecting to find some sort of unexposed answer why women don’t go into finance. Instead, I discovered an industry whose members realize there is a problem and desperately want to figure out how they can improve.

InvestHer is a fabulous step in the right direction. Connecting women in Tippie to women in the finance industry is something that neither McGonigal nor Pokorny needed to take their time to do. But, as soon as they did, they were met with support from local high schools, Tippie, and faculty members. If you are a woman in finance or a woman thinking about pursuing a degree in business, you should give InvestHer a shot.