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Individual #investors pulled $20 million from #Fisher Investments following billionaire’s #sexist comments #womeninvest

Though retail investors have largely remained, public pension plans said they are divesting more than $3 billion in the weeks following Fisher’s comments.


Individual investors at Fisher Investments transferred $20 million from the firm the week after the billionaire made lewd comments at a conference, according to a research note from Mercer, an advisor to institutional investors.

The development was disclosed on a conference call Fisher executives held on Oct. 14 with Mercer, to discuss the fallout from founder Ken Fisher’s comments at the Tiburon CEO Summit, according to the note obtained by CNBC.

When speaking at the conference on Oct. 8, Fisher had likened winning new clients to picking up women at a bar. He had used similar language at another conference in 2018.

Though the billionaire apologized, institutional investors — including seven government pensions — reacted quickly.

www.cnbc.com
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JP Morgan just promoted 117 people to Wall Street’s top rank, including a record number of women #Chase

Of this year’s incoming class of managing directors, 26% were women, up from 18% last year, according to a person with knowledge of the figures.


J.P. Morgan Chase’s Wall Street division just promoted 117 people to its highest rank of managing director, and a record number of women earned the title.

Of this year’s incoming class of managing directors, 26% were women, up from 18% last year, according to a person with knowledge of the figures. Of these 30 women, seven made use of the bank’s maternity leave policy in the past two years, the person said.

Bank CEOs from J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon to Goldman Sachs head David Solomon have said that hiring and promoting women and minorities are priorities for their trading and advisory businesses, which are still dominated by men, especially at senior levels.

For instance, last month Goldman expanded a year-old program to hire more junior bankers from underrepresented groups. By aiming for half of all new analysts and entry-level associates hired in the U.S. to be women, 11 percent black, and 14 percent Latino, the bank hopes that more women and minorities will eventually make it to the firm’s senior roles.

www.cnbc.com
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These investments aim to push for workplace diversity and gender-pay equity

If you want to invest in companies based on how well they integrate women, there are funds that follow that strategy.


If you want to see a better gender balance in the workforce, you may want to consider putting your money where your mouth is.

Enter gender and diversity funds, which screen for certain characteristics — such as women in leadership — and let you back companies that share those priorities.

These are funds that seek to make a measurable impact, alongside financial return, by investing in companies with a record of measuring and improving workplace diversity and equal pay for equal work.

Among U.S. asset managers, there are 15 funds — exchange-traded funds and mutuals — that fall into the gender and diversity sustainable investing category, according to investment research company Morningstar.

www.cnbc.com
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To Help Boost Female-led Startups, More Women Join Investor Ranks

Giving more women the ability to influence which startups get money helps get more women funding


Houston — Men have long leveraged their networks to succeed in business, and the tech industry has been no exception. Women, finding themselves outside of the club, are now creating their own networks to do the same.

Katelyn O’Shaughnessy already had a solid track record, selling TripScope, a travel startup she co-founded in 2013, to Travefy two years ago. But when looking for funding for her second company, Doctours, she says, “I kept hearing, ‘I love your idea, but I’m not sure about you being CEO.’ ” The investors O’Shaughnessy was pitching didn’t believe she fit the profile of what they considered a tech founder, she says.

Laura Wagner, co-founder and chief vision officer of electronic payments startup Digitzs, who is also based in Los Angeles, says she faced similar skepticism from the venture community—even with some heavy-hitters on the startup’s board of directors, including chairman David Jacques, PayPal’s first CFO.

www.xconomy.com
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Equal Pay Day. Here's what women can do to close the gender pay gap for good. #EqualPay #GenderPayGap

The gender pay gap is real, but it's shrinking and women have a clear path to putting it in the past once and for all.


As we reflect on Equal Pay Day today, let’s take a moment for a little bit of history: A little over 30 years ago, women earned 64 cents for every dollar a man earned — a pay gap of 36 cents. Today, we earn 80 cents, making the gap 20 cents — or about half of what it used to be. For women of color, the gap is even greater. Black women earn 63 cents for every dollar that men do, Native American women earn 58 cents and Hispanic women make just 54 cents.

(Note: You may see slightly different numbers floating around out there, and that’s because of different data sets used. For example, The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t count bonuses, while the Census Bureau does, and some calculations use hourly wages while others rely on salary. The important thing to note is that the gender pay gap is still here and it’s still big.)

But there is good news — according a 2019 report from Glassdoor Economic Research, the gender pay gap is shrinking in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and four other countries — it’s nearly 3 percent narrower today than it was three years ago.

www.nbcnews.com
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Mary Barra Will Lead the Auto Industry's First Majority-Female Board #MaryBarra #GM

Women are going to occupy six of GM’s 11 board seats


Women will be the majority on the board of General Motors Co. later this year, after two male directors retire. It’s a first for an automaker and places GM among a small handful of companies with roughly the same number of men and women at the highest level.

GM’s board will shrink to 11 members, from 13, with two directors not standing for re-election at the annual meeting on June 4, the company said in its proxy filing. Jim Mulva, former CEO of ConocoPhillips, and Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, are both 72, the retirement age for the automaker’s board.

The board will temporarily waive the retirement age requirement for Lead Director Tim Solso, also 72, for one year to assist in GM’s “period of transformation,” the company said. Six women, including Chief Executive Officer Mary Barra, and five men complete the slate of members up for shareholders’ approval at the annual meeting.

The shift comes as women are slowly gaining more power at the largest U.S. companies, lifted by pressure from investors and employees as well as state-mandated quotas. Researcher Equilar says women may now comprise half the members of Russell 3000 company boards by 2034, a forecast that’s shortened by two decades since 2016.

www.bloomberg.com
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Serena Williams Just Revealed That She’s Been Secretly Investing In Women for 5 Years #SerenaWilliams

Serena Williams just shared a long kept secret on Instagram.


She has been investing in women and diverse companies for the past 5 years.

The tennis champ revealed Wednesday that she launched her own investing fund, Serena Ventures, in 2014. “Yes, I know I can keep a secret,” she said in the post. “We have so many exciting things coming up!” Her fund focuses on early-stage companies that embrace “diverse leadership [and] individual empowerment” and look for creative new ways to address age-old problems.

In the past 5 years, the professional athlete shared (in a second Instagram photo) that she has invested in over 20 companies, ranging from Billie, a razor subscription company for women, to Brandless, an online retailer of everyday items without big brand names, to Lola, a reproductive health subscription company.

www.thestoryexchange.org
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Enough mansplaining: women tackle gender investment gap #genderinvestmentgap

"It's important you have somebody across the table you can relate to," summed up Janet Cowell, CEO of Girls Who Invest.


As a professional woman in her late 30s, Kate Packard was keen to start investing. Like many novices, her enthusiasm took a knock when she hit a wall of impenetrable jargon -- and was all but killed off by "mansplaining" from the men around her.

"They'll be like, 'Money is green! And it's paper!'" said the strategic communications manager from Sterling, Virginia. "Yes, thanks, I can get there on my own."

To do so, the 38-year-old turned to one of a growing number of groups run by women, for women -- to help bridge the gender gap when it comes to investment.

Women are significantly less likely to invest in the market than men: based on studies from 2016 and 2017, the micro-investing app Acorns found 57 percent of women don't invest at all, versus 44 percent of men.

Over a lifetime, that can translate into hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost income -- and can hit particularly hard in countries like the United States, where wise investment can make the difference between hardship and comfort in retirement.

www.dailymail.co.uk
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How Women Will Make History at Warren Buffett's 2019 Berkshire Hathaway Weekend

Today it appears that conversations about gender bias in investing are reaching a tipping point.


At last year’s Berkshire Hathaway meeting in Omaha, three women met and wondered out loud why female investors were so underrepresented in the conferences and meetings of one of the premier investing events of the year.

But it wasn’t just in Omaha that female investors were missing at the table. At a time when women are making substantive progress in many fields, two statistics underscore the problems faced by female-owned investment companies. First reported in a landmark study by the Knight Foundation “Ownership Diversity in the Asset Management Industry” these are:

Among all investment companies operating in the U.S, only about three percent are owned by women. The total value of Assets Under Management (AUM) controlled by female investors, represents only one percent of all U.S. investment company AUM. So Kim Shannon, the founder and CEO of Sionna Investment Management, LJ Rittenhouse, Berkshire author, financial analyst and inventor of Candor AnalyticsTM and Barbara Ann Bernard, the founder and CEO of Wincrest Capital, decided to do something.

To raise awareness about the gender bias gap in the investment sector – possibly one of the biggest (and most ignored) gaps in business – we would host the Variant Perspectives Conference in Omaha around the 2019 Berkshire Hathaway meeting weekend and explain why this gap persists. We would present the case for growing AUFM: Assets Under Female Management.

www.forbes.com
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Women Who Tech founder: Investors ‘are leaving billions’ behind by not funding women-led startups #WomenWhoTech

“VCs need to actually stick to their commitments of diversifying their portfolios” because “the reality is that it's not happening.”


Venture capitalists (VCs) are leaving “billions of dollars on the table behind by not funding women-led startups,” Allyson Kapin, Founder of Women Who Tech, recently told The First Trade.

Last year, women-led startups received 2.2% of $130 billion in VC funding, according to data collected from PitchBook. That percentage has stalled since 2017.

About 86 to 90% of investor money worldwide is going to startups founded by men, according to Crunchbase.

“The investor community needs to come in. They need to start funding women-led startups,” Kapin said. “In the last two years, we have seen all of the major VCs come out and admit that this is a problem that they are having a pipeline issue. And they have made all sorts of pledges, diversity pledges, that they were going to start increasing their diversity in their portfolios. But we are not seeing that.”

finance.yahoo.com
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When Will We See More Gender Equality in Investing? #GenderEquality

  • Firms with capable young women should offer more flexibility through the years in which they need that option.
  • Because there are so few female role models available, firms need to invest in more mentoring programs for women.


    • In many spheres, such as politics, media and entertainment, women have made considerable progress in reaching executive leadership positions, achieving higher pay, and building new enterprises. But this ascent hasn’t been achieved everywhere. In my own industry, investing, progress has been painfully slow.

    Aside from professional sports, the investment business — encompassing investment management, mutual, hedge, private equity, and venture capital funds — might have the lowest percentage of women at the top of the pyramid (at 4%). And women only control between 1% and 3.5% of assets under management, depending on specific class.

    The lack of women leaders in investing is an issue that more firms should be worried about. Research shows that gender diversity at the top is connected to positive returns. And aside from financial performance, retaining and promoting more women in a field is the only way to ensure that promising talent isn’t being lost or shuffled out of the industry.

    www.hbr.org
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    The firm behind Wall Street’s Fearless Girl statue isn’t as pro-woman as it could be #StateStreet #FearlessGirl

    The Fearless Girl is an empty marketing ploy masquerading as female empowerment.


    The firm behind the “Fearless Girl” statue on Wall Street isn’t as into gender diversity as it claims, at least according to one measure.

    The investment management company State Street Corporation has positioned itself as an advocate for women and gender diversity in corporate America in recent years. In 2016, State Street launched an investment fund devoted to gender-diverse companies, and the following year, it placed a statue of the Fearless Girl staring down the Charging Bull in New York City’s Financial District. (The Fearless Girl statue has since moved to across from the New York Stock Exchange a couple of blocks away.)

    But according to a new report from the investment research company Morningstar, State Street might not be putting its money — or rather, its shareholder votes — where its mouth is on promoting women in the upper echelons of corporations.

    Of the 10 times its gender diversity fund used its shareholder votes to weigh in on a gender diversity or pay equity proposal for one of the companies it invests in over a three-year period, the fund only voted in favor of the proposal twice. Six times, it voted against the proposal, and twice, it abstained. Morningstar compared it to two other gender-focused funds, the Glenmede Women in Leadership US Equity Portfolio and the Pax Ellevate Global Women’s Leadership Fund, which voted for diversity and pay equity proposals every time.

    www.vox.com
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    Investing with equal pay in mind may be more difficult than you think #ImpactInvesting

    Investors who are concerned about equal pay may want to consider certain gender and diversity funds that are making this issue a priority. When selecting investments, be sure to keep in mind that how these funds advocate for these issues, and how successful certain proposals are, can vary widely.


    Women earn just about 80 cents for every dollar that men make, and that difference can add up big over time.

    A women who starts her career today will miss out on $406,760 in earnings over 40 years, according to new estimates from the National Women's Law Center.

    With more public attention to this issue — and with April 2 marking Equal Pay Day — gender and diversity funds have emerged to help investors identify companies that are paying attention to these concerns.

    The universe of funds operating in this area is relatively small. New research from Morningstar identifies a total of 15 equity mutual funds and exchange traded funds that it categorizes as gender and diversity sustainable investments.

    But just investing in those funds does not always mean you're directly moving the needle when it comes to closing the gender pay gap. Morningstar's research identifies two key reasons why.

    www.cnbc.com
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    Here's What Millennial Women Need To Know About Money And The Pay Gap In 2019 #genderpaygap

    “My generation failed you. Completely failed you,” said Ellevest CEO Sallie Krawcheck. “We played the game the way it was laid out.”


    Equal pay is a big issue, and it’s even the subject of a bill that recently passed the House and is now in the Senate. Women in the US still earn about $0.79 for every $1 a man earns, on average, according to estimates in a new Glassdoor report. The Pew Research Center estimates it to be $0.85. And while the gap is narrower for millennials than it is for older workers, women ages 25 to 34 still earn 86.8% of what men their age earn (it’s 80.1% for women ages 35 to 44), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    The point is, the gender pay gap still exists for young adults, and it’s is even wider for women of color. And this, according to Sallie Krawcheck, CEO of the women-focused digital investment platform Ellevest, is precisely why women need a tailored approach to managing their finances and investing. Krawcheck, previously dubbed the most powerful woman on Wall Street, launched Ellevest in 2016, which “uses an algorithm that accounts for gender differences related to women’s pay, career breaks, and lifespan.” Unequal pay perpetuates a gender investing gap, she said.

    For one, “The retirement savings shortfall is a female crisis. We retire with two-thirds the money of men,” and yet women have a longer life expectancy, Krawcheck said at a Women’s History Month event hosted by BuzzFeed in March. That’s a long-term concern, but a real one.

    www.buzzfeednews.com
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    Investment platform Ellevest raises $33M Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures, Valerie Jarrett & PayPal #MelindaGates

    “When the status quo isn’t meeting women’s needs, it deserves to be disrupted, and that’s what this platform created by women for women aims to do,” said Melinda Gates


    Ellevest, a digital investment platform specifically focused on helping women meet their financial goals, has raised an additional $33 million in a new round led by Rethink Impact and PSP Growth. The funding includes a handful of notable, new investors including Melinda Gates’s investment fund Pivotal Ventures; PayPal; Wynn Resorts co-founder Elaine Wynn; former Google and Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt; former top aide to President Obama, Valerie Jarrett; Gingerbread Capital, founded by Linnea Roberts; and Mastercard.

    The startup was founded by former Citigroup CFO Sallie Krawcheck, and launched in May 2016 at TechCrunch Disrupt NY after having previously raised its $10 million in seed funding.

    As Krawcheck explained at the time, women were in need of a financial platform that took into account specifics related to their lives – like the fact that their salary arc over a lifetime is different from men, because women typically live longer; or because there are salary differentials between women’s and men’s pay; as well as other factors that some women face – like choosing to take time off from a career to focus on children.

    www.techcrunch.com
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    Cambridge Associates reaches diversity milestone: half of #leadership team are women #CambridgeAssociates

    Ashby Hatch's promotion means that seven of the 14 members of the leadership team are female


    The promotion of a female executive this week at Cambridge Associates moves the $33 billion Boston-based asset management firm into the rarified ranks of companies with at least half their leadership team represented by women.

    Cambridge, a 45-year-old company that employs 1,200 people, this week promoted Ashby Hatch to head of global investment research.

    The promotion moves her to the 14-person leadership team, seven of whom are women.

    Across the male-dominated financial services industry such milestones are celebrated, particularly among women who recognize the challenges of gaining any ground when it comes to diversity.

    www.investmentnews.com
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    Investment bank Goldman Sachs wants half of its entry-level recruits to be women #GoldmanSachs

    The bank is expanding its goal of 50 percent female recruitment in the analysts it picks from college campuses. It will now include in that goal people hired laterally into entry-level jobs.


    Goldman Sachs said it is boosting its efforts to improve diversity at the storied investment bank, setting goals for the first time for hiring black and Latino associates and saying it will tie top leaders' pay and promotions to their progress on those goals.

    In a memo to employees Monday, CEO David Solomon said the bank was expanding a year-old goal of 50 percent female recruitment in the crop of analysts it picks from college campuses each year. It will now include in that goal people hired laterally into entry-level jobs and set goals for several diverse groups.

    In addition to having women make up half of all incoming Goldman analysts and entry-level associates — representing 70 percent of the bank's annual hiring — the bank aims to have 11 percent of those recruits be black and 14 percent be Hispanic/Latino in the Americas.

    Goldman also announced new steps to address diversity within its more senior ranks, a move that comes within weeks of the deadline to report on its gender pay gap in Britain. Last year, Goldman reported that the average hourly rate for its female employees in the United Kingdom was 55.5 percent lower than the rate for men. The median hourly rate was 36.4 percent lower for women.

    www.chicagotribune.com
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    How to Evaluate Funds that Invest in Women

    Socially responsible investment funds can also focus on gender equality.


    Investing in mutual funds and exchange-traded funds that promote environmental, social and governance policies allows people to try and align their investments with their values – that includes investing in women.

    A growing amount of data show that ESG-focused investments can perform just as well or even better than traditional investments, letting people do good socially and financially. That’s true for funds focusing on environmental and corporate governance factors, in which there are plenty of easy-to-quantify metrics. The data are less robust for funds focusing on improving social outcomes, such as those that purport to highlight women’s issues.

    That lack of data hasn’t stopped fund issuers from creating investments geared toward women, as more women invest in stocks, mutual funds and ETFs. In fact, some research shows women are more likely to choose socially responsible investments.

    But fund managers say it takes a bit more than simply choosing an investment marketed as gender-equitable to know that the fund does what it says does. The good news is that market observers say it’s getting easier. Here are a few aspects to know about gender-equitable investments:

    money.usnews.com
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    Financial literacy could make advice more accessible to women of color #WomentoWatch

    Industry leaders share their ideas at InvestmentNews Women to Watch think tank


    Financial illiteracy in the U.S. hits women and women of color especially hard, according to several participants in an InvestmentNews workshop on the role financial literacy can play in making the advice industry more diverse and inclusive. The half-day think tank was held directly before this year's Women to Watch awards luncheon.

    As reported in a recent InvestmentNews' investigation, only 57% of American adults are financially literate, ranking the U.S.14th among all nations despite having the world's largest economy. The U.S. is only slightly more financially literate than the population of Botswana, which has an economy that is 1,127% smaller.

    The issue is even worse among women and women of color, explained Chloe McKenzie, founder and CEO of BlackFem and On A Wealth Kick.

    "Wealth inequality is real, it's crippling and it's distributed heavily along racial and gender lines," Ms. McKenzie told the think tank. "Girls and women of color need the most help."

    www.investmentnews.com
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    UBS says NASA's all-women spacewalk is a 'giant leap' with 'significant investment implications'

    "NASA will make history with the first all-women spacewalk this month," UBS told investors. The event amplifies the messages of both space exploration and gender equality, UBS added, which "are both likely to have significant investment implications."


    At the end of March a team of five women will break barriers in space, an event investment bank UBS thinks is more than symbolic: It's pivotal to investors.

    "NASA will make history with the first all-women spacewalk this month," UBS said in a note to investors on Monday titled "one giant leap for woman-kind." The event amplifies the messages of both space exploration and gender equality, UBS added, which "are both likely to have significant investment implications."

    UBS pointed to research that gender equality "will have major economic implications," the bank said. Narrowing the gap between the percentage of men and women participating in the global labor force could add $12 trillion to the world's GDP in the next six years, according to consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

    Additionally, UBS found that companies where women make up at least 20 percent of either the board of directors or senior management "were more profitable than their less gender diverse peers on several metrics," the firm said.

    www.cnbc.com
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