An Interview with Kathleen Baird

In the first episode of 2026, Pat and Doug interview Kate Baird. Kate is the Managing Director of the Wealth Management Platform at First Rate, where she has spent 31 years. She talks about her role and what she enjoys most about working at First Rate, and shares why she sees investment performance as a helping profession at its core. Kate also explores the reasons women dominate helping professions but continue to be underrepresented in finance, and highlights the many ways professionals can build careers in performance measurement without being quants. "This field needs empaths, people who deeply relate to other people. We need communicators and visual thinkers because you are trying to tell a story with numbers. That's ultimately what you are trying to do: communicate meaning behind those numbers." In the lightning round, Kate shares the historical figure she’d most like to have dinner with, the fictional world she’d love to visit, and the theme song of her life.