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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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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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Meet The Top Women Investors Of The Midas List In 2019 #MidasList

Globally, only about 17% of investment-level positions at venture firms are held by women, according to PitchBook data this year.


Women are still a minority among the most successful venture capital investors, but their presence is growing. Twelve female investors made it onto this year’s Midas List, a record for the annual ranking and an increase from nine women a year ago. The cohort includes three female newcomers, one of whom, Kathy Xu, is the highest-ranked woman on the list.

The Midas List ranks venture capital investors based on the number and dollar size of exits and highly-valued private companies over the past five years, with a premium on bolder early-stage deals. Produced in partnership with TrueBridge Capital Partners, the ranking counts only exits (public offerings or acquisitions) that are over $200 million or private investment rounds valuing companies at $400 million or more.

Newcomer Kathy Xu, founder and partner at Shanghai-based firm Capital Today, joins the list at the very lofty No. 6 spot, thanks largely to her prescient bet on JD.com, China’s No. 2 online retailer, plus investments in Chinese gaming company NetEase and discount e-commerce site Meituan-Dianping. Capital Today was just a year old when Xu bet on JD.com as its only Series A investor. After the e-commerce site went public in 2015, she had a career-making win. Her $18 million check returned $2.9 billion to Capital Today and its investors. Xu began her career as a bank clerk in China, then worked at Hong Kong investment firm Peregrine and Baring Private Equity Asia before founding Capital Today in 2005.

www.forbes.com
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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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Bank CEOs don't think a woman or person of color will succeed them

"Let the record reflect... all white men and none of you, not one, appears to believe that your successor will be a female or a person of color."


At a House Financial Committee hearing, Rep. Al Green asked seven white male CEOs of major banks if they believe their successors will be a woman or person of color. None of them raised their hands.

www.cnn.com
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Elvie raises $42M to become the go-to destination for women’s health

Under Boler’s fearless leadership, Elvie has raised nearly $50 million and started a much-needed conversation around women’s issues, like pelvic floor health and public breastfeeding.


Elvie, the developer of femtech hardware including a silent wearable breast pump and a smart pelvic floor exerciser, is one of the boldest startups around.

Led by co-founder and chief executive officer Tania Boler, the London-based business has successfully infiltrated the bro-y community of venture capitalists, which has historically shied away from the “unrelatable” and “niche” sector that is women’s health. Of course, that sector isn’t niche at all, the global women’s health market is expected to be worth $51.3 billion by 2025, but investors have only recently begun to accept that reality.

Elvie is today announcing its third private financing, a $42 million Series B led by IPGL to support the release of four additional women’s health products. Octopus Ventures and Impact Ventures U.K. have also participated in the round.

Six-year-old Elvie is led by Boler and co-founder Alexander Asseily, a hardware vet and co-founder of the consumer electronics business Jawbone, which despite its many struggles, managed to get VCs to cough up hundreds of millions of dollars before it folded. Boler’s expertise in the space — she has a Ph.D. in sexual health — and Asseily’s hardware prowess have undoubtedly lured investors, as has Elvie’s breast pump, launched in September, which boasts a waitlist of thousands of women.

www.techcrunch.com
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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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Women-Led Startups Are Tearing Down The Boys' Club

"Of the 22 companies whose valuations have passed the $1 billion mark so far this year, six of them were solely founded or co-founded by women.


It was a big week in tech. From Rent the Runway and Glossier being crowned with unicorn status for hitting $1B valuations, to Ellevest’s $33M new round of investment, to black women founded companies like Landit breaking fundraising records, women founders and investors had some big wins. Let’s dig in.

New Unicorns Could #ChangeTheRatio for Women Founders

Two women-led startups, Glossier (a cosmetics company founded by Emily Weiss), and Rent the Runway (a fashion rental retailer cofounded by Jenn Hyman and Jenny Fleiss), announced their $1 billion dollar valuations.

That single-digit number might not sound like a great start for female founders working to close the gender gap in VC, but it is. Why? Because in 2018, roughly 11% of the total unicorns involved female founders, and as we wrap up the first quarter of 2019, that share has more than doubled to 27%, said," said Priyamvada Mathur of PitchBook.

www.forbes.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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Rent the Runway is now a unicorn #RenttheRunway

With a $125 million investment round, Rent the Runway is now valued at over $1 billion. The female unicorn club just got a little bigger.


Rent the Runway has achieved unicorn status. Today, it announces a $125 million investment from institutional investors like Franklin Templeton, Bain Capital, and T. Rowe Price–along with existing lead investors–bringing the company’s total investment to $337 million. This new funding values the company at $1 billion.

Jennifer Hyman, Rent the Runway’s cofounder and CEO, is now part of an exclusive club of female CEOs running empires valued at more than $1 billion. This includes Stitch Fix’s Katrina Lake, 23andMe’s Anne Wokcicki, and Houzz’s Adi Tatarko. This week, Glossier’s Emily Weiss became part of this cohort, thanks to new Series D funding round. And Forbes estimates that Kylie Jenner’s cosmetic company is worth $900 million which means her net worth is now $1 billion.

When Hyman cofounded Rent the Runway in 2009 with her Harvard Business School classmate Jennifer Fleiss, the idea was to offer women rentable fancy gowns and dresses for events so they did not have to buy them. In 2016, Rent the Runway announced that it was profitable. That same year, Hyman decided to expand the company’s offerings to everyday clothes via a new program called Unlimited. “The primary use case that we knew women wanted was going to work because of the financial tax that is placed on female professionals to have variety in their wardrobe,” she says.

www.fastcompany.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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Bumble Fund's Latest Investment Will Help Female Entrepreneurs Get Funding and Find Mentors

The AI platform, called Alice, also will help Whitney Wolfe Herd's venture arm find more women-run businesses for its portfolio.


Whitney Wolfe Herd's Bumble is a lot more than a women-empowering dating app these days--and through the company's venture capital arm, it has been expanding its ties to other innovative female-founded businesses.

Last week it announced its latest round of investments, ranging between $5,000 and $250,000, through the Bumble Fund. The round included an investment in Alice, an AI-powered platform helmed by Elizabeth Gore and Carolyn Rodz that recommends resources such as startup accelerators and networking events to help entrepreneurs grow their companies. (Gore is on the Inc. Board of Advisers and is an Inc.com columnist.) Alice had previously received $200,000 from Melinda Gates, who last February made it the very first investment from her Pivotal Ventures organization.

Alice's platform is open to all business owners, but it prioritizes recommendations for women and other underrepresented entrepreneurs, with a goal of helping increase inclusivity and accessibility.

www.inc.com
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UBS is ignoring its own advice on women’s rights

Using maternity leave to cut female managers’ bonuses is hardly the way to gender equality


On International Women’s Day on Friday, one company signalling that the financial services industry needed to do more for gender equality was UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank. Making its point, it devoted prominent space on its website to senior female managers airing their expertise on financial markets. All the more awkward, then, was Monday’s disclosure by this newspaper that a number of top UBS female employees had criticised the bank for using their maternity leave to impose long-term cuts on their bonuses.

More than a dozen women in the bank’s Swiss wealth management unit cited the treatment they had suffered, which in many cases saw their bonuses cut by a nearly a third or more. They had complained more than a year ago, but continued to be affected. Some had resigned in frustration.

The female employees had also been subjected to patronising comments from managers that are entirely out of keeping with the modern financial — or indeed any — workplace. As an explanation for her bonus cut, one was told that she had made the “lifestyle choice” of being a working mother. Another, when protesting about a lower bonus, was told to “focus on her baby”. Their situation contrasts sharply with Swiss male employees who take several weeks’ annual leave for obligatory military service and suffer no bonus cuts.

Apart from being totally unfair, the case amounts to dismal public relations for a global bank. While it appears to affect women employed only in Switzerland, it can only be demoralising for women employed by UBS throughout the world to know that its home base operates in such a fashion. 

www.ft.com
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Unlocking the Power of Women in Investing

The financial services industry is undergoing a dramatic shift.


The next generation of investors will be younger and much more diverse, with women taking an increasingly prominent role in building and growing family and personal wealth.

Today’s infographic comes to us from New York Life Investments, and it showcases how this new paradigm will shape the future of products and services on offer in the industry, as well as how wealth managers can cater to these changing needs.

Women are underrepresented in the investing world, but this is changing fast. While various cultural and societal reasons are contributors to this, there is also a more simple driver: rising economic might.

  • Women-controlled wealth in the U.S. will increase from $14 trillion to $22 trillion between 2015-2020
  • Women control 51% of all personal wealth in the United States today
  • Women are set to inherit $28.7 trillion in intergenerational wealth over the next 40 years
www.visualcapitalist.com
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The median gender pay gap - It’s time to tell the whole story #mediangenderpaygap

Arjuna Capital is announcing an important new phase of their work: a median pay gap shareholder resolution engaging a dozen major US companies across the banking, tech, and retail sectors.


There are gender pay gaps … and then there are median gender pay gaps. Understanding the difference between the two may determine just how much progress women make in terms of fairer compensation in the next decade.

So first, the definitions:

“Equal pay” gap: What women are paid versus their direct male peers, statistically adjusted for factors such as job, seniority, and geography. Often referred to in the context of “equal pay for equal work.”

“Median pay” gap: The median pay of women working full time versus men working full time. This is an unadjusted raw measure used by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Women in the US, for example, make 80 cents on the dollar versus men on this basis.

Equal pay gaps measure whether women are being paid commensurate with their peers for the work they are doing today. But median pay gaps measure whether or not women are holding as many high-paying jobs as men. Narrowing the median pay gap means putting more women in leadership (and reaping the performance benefits that diversity affords). And that’s where investors come in. Concerned shareholders in major US financial and tech companies want to make sure the pay gap difference is understood—and acted upon.

www.qz.com
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Mary Ellen Iskenderian, CEO Of Women's World Banking, On The Future Of Impact Investing #ImpactInvesting

“Are you serving women?” -Mary Ellen Iskenderian


As President and CEO of Women’s World Banking, Mary Ellen Iskenderian is passionate about bringing impactful financial services offerings to women across the globe. Throughout her early career in investment banking and financial services, Iskenderian says that questions like, “How many women are you serving?” and “Are women getting loans at the same size as men?” were never really asked - something that, through her work with WWB, she’s working to change.

Iskenderian started her career at Lehman Brothers, but soon realized that the role she was playing there didn’t allow her to make the kind of positive impact that she wanted to be able to through her finance career. Iskenderian was later accepted into the World Bank’s Young Professionals Program, where, during her time there, world events changed the path of her career forever. The Berlin Wall fell, and the World Bank was tasked with helping to rebuild public and private financial institutions. Iskenderian spent the next eight years working on stock exchanges, securities regulators, reclaiming financial systems, and largely serving as an advisor to Eastern Europeans companies in need of direction at that time. She also worked on the first IPO that was done on the Warsaw Stock Exchange (housed in the former KGB headquarters in Warsaw), which she calls “an extraordinary opportunity and an amazing moment in history.”

www.forbes.com
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