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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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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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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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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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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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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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Serena Williams joins Bumble’s investment fund as an investor

Serena Williams, the global sports and fashion icon and investor, is doubling down on her relationship with the dating app Bumble with today’s announcement that she will serve as an investor in its Bumble Fund.


Launched in 2018, the Bumble Fund backs early-stage businesses founded and led by women of color and underrepresented groups. The fund’s commitments range between $5,000 and $250,000, with an average check size of $25,000.

“In my life, and today more than ever, I’ve learned how impactful one woman’s voice can be when given a platform to speak and be heard,” said Serena Williams, in a statement.

Williams, one of the greatest tennis players of all time, has been investing in women and minority-owned businesses through Serena Ventures since 2014. She also serves on the boards of the tech companies Poshmark and SurveyMonkey.

She began her relationship with Bumble in January, culminating with a starring role in the company’s most recent Super Bowl commercial earlier this year, and will be leading the Bumble Fund pitch competition next month, along with Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd.

www.techcrunch.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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Activist Investors Fall Short on Gender Parity #activistinvestors #genderparity

Only 13 percent of their board nominees were women last year.


Activist hedge fund managers are too passive when it comes to gender equality.

Of the 143 board members who were nominated by activist hedge funds in 2018, just 19, or 13 percent, were women, according to a new study from Activist Insight. That compares with about a third of all board members who were nominated last year. The 13 percent does appear to be a bit of an improvement. In early 2016, Bloomberg reported that just 5 percent of all activist nominees had been women during the previous five years. Still, in a year when there was a heightened awareness about the long-standing inequality of women in the workplace, activist investors could have been expected to make a bigger push for board equality.

That didn’t happen. Carl Icahn, for instance, nominated 18 directors in 2018 — the most of any activist hedge fund manager. The number of whom were women: zero. Nelson Peltz, who runs Trian Fund Management, nominated and placed three directors on corporate boards. None were women.

In all, just 16 out of the 60 investment funds tracked by Activist Insight nominated women to be directors. And of those, only three funds nominated more than one woman to be a director last year, according to the study. Legion Partners was the most, with four female nominees out of 12. Starboard Value and Elliott Management tied for second place with two women each.

www.bloomberg.com
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Billion Dollar Fund for Women comes to Canada to sign up more VCs #BillionDollarFund

Rementilla is working with a network of regional leads to introduce Billion Dollar Fund to Canada’s venture industry.


Billion Dollar Fund for Women, a global initiative that aims to increase investment in women-founded companies, has arrived in Canada to recruit local venture firms.

The launch was announced today by Lally Rementilla, the fund’s Canada lead and president of Quantius, a Toronto intellectual-property lender and one of the fund’s early supporters.

Rementilla told PE Hub Canada that the fund is looking to spread awareness in Canada about the gender financing gap.

It also offers a plan of action involving pledges by VC firms to invest a portion of their capital in tech startups created by female entrepreneurs.

Established in 2018 at the annual meetings of the IMF/World Bank, Billion Dollar Fund asks for pledges from VC firms, typically ranging $1 million to $100 million, with the goal of reaching US$1 billion in all.

www.pehub.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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How This Female Black Venture Capitalist Is Changing The Investment Landscape #womeninvest

I think many women are afraid to demand their worth and ask for what they want – a raise, a promotion, more time off, but it’s a catch-22, because you’ll never get what you want if you don’t ask for it.


Abyah Wynn is the female, black venture capitalist who is changing the investment landscape for women and minority founders. 92% of males make up executive roles at venture capital firms with 78% of those males being white. Even more shocking- only 1% of the senior investment teams at VC firms are black. Needless to say, Wynn is dually advocating change for women and minority VC executives and founders. Wynn leads business development as the Vice President of Trimantium Capital and founder of Twenty65 Fund where money is being placed directly in the hands of female and minority founders. She shares how she has taken the investment world by storm by implementing new standards, opportunities and educating the current culture on diversifying representation.

www.forbes.com
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This fund manager wants to prove gender equality is good for profits #Meritz

John Lee of Meritz Asset Management says companies that push for women’s empowerment are a good investment


SOUTH KOREA - John Lee joined Meritz Asset Management as chief executive five years ago, when few women were in positions of power at the firm. Yet things at the Seoul-based company have changed - today the head of marketing is female, eight of the 10 fund sales staff are women, and the investment team has almost reached gender parity.

Now Mr Lee has a bigger ambition: to prove it can be profitable to invest in Korean companies that push for women’s empowerment.

Mr Lee has created a “women-focused” fund aimed at promoting female participation in South Korean companies, which Mr Meritz says is the first of its kind in the country’s industry. Besides looking at business fundamentals, the open-ended Meritz The Women Fund adds criteria related to gender diversity and equality such as the ratio of women employees and directors at a firm as well as work-life balance policies.

Hana Tour Service and CJ ENM - both have workforces that are half female - are in the fund’s still-concentrated portfolio, which consists of 25 to 30 companies.

“Korean woman are highly educated, but they don’t have equal opportunities” in the corporate world, says Mr Lee, the chief executive and also the fund manager. “These highly qualified, highly educated women definitely can contribute to shareholders’ value. That’s always my thinking.”

www.bloomberg.com
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Interview with Sarah Chen of Billion Dollar Fund for Women #SarahChen #BillionDollarFund

The startup world is known for being dominated by men. With The Billion Dollar Fund for Women, entrepreneur and investor Sarah Chen wants to change this by channeling $1 billion towards women-led and gender-diverse projects.


Chen, 29, born in Malaysia, hosted her own television show from the age of nine. Today, she is the chief strategy officer of the startup Bloxed and lives in Washington D.C. In October 2018, she founded The Billion Dollar Fund for Women with four other women. Shelly Porges, an American investor who worked with Hillary Clinton for years in the State Department, is co-managing partner of the fund.

According to Fortune, $85 billion in venture capital was invested in startups in 2017, but only 2 percent of that was invested in companies founded or run by women. If money is opportunistic, why doesn't it automatically flow towards success?

Chen: Because decisions made about the use of money are never black and white. And those who control where the money goes are still subject to the law of familiarity, at least when we talk about venture capital. Unfortunately, not all venture decisions are made based only on statistics. Otherwise investors would always favor diverse teams. Studies show that such teams are more successful and generate around 50 percent higher revenues.

But investors want to see returns. How is it possible that this investment gap exists at all?

Chen: A key underlying issue is the unconscious bias we each naturally have. When a venture fund invests in a company at a very early stage, even without any proven repeatable revenue, what do they invest in? They invest in the judgment of the founder's track record and potential success -- and yes, the law of familiarity means that an old white man might back a younger white male entrepreneur who reminds him of himself when he was an entrepreneur, who may have accessed him through a Harvard old boys network or so. This means that by looking different, we may not fit the bill of a safe bet.

www.spiegel.de
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Women Investors Call for More Competition—From Other Women

Calling all female investors: Even as women-run venture capital firms have sprung up over the past few years, there’s plenty of room for more, female VCs say.


That was the message last week during a panel of women investors at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Next Gen Summit in Laguna Niguel, Calif.

“I think there’s room for 20, 40, 50 funds that are just for women,” said Nisha Dua, a general partner at BBG Ventures, a women-led firm that invests in startups with at least one female founder. (BBG stands for “built by girls.”)

Dua said she is often asked to explain how BBG differentiates itself from the handful of other women-focused funds that exist, a question she thinks would not apply to the plethora of male-run VC firms, which have historically invested mostly in startups run by men. “Would you have asked Sequoia how they’re different from Benchmark?” Dua questioned, referring to two of the leading Silicon Valley VCs, both of which have male founders.

Just 2% of venture capital funding went to female startup founders last year. But that could increase if more women were in charge of the investment decisions: “Data shows that a female partner is more likely to invest in a female founder,” Dua added.

www.fortune.com
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More women needed on boards, says UK’s biggest pension scheme #womenonboards

USS will use its votes to influence companies lacking female directors




The UK’s largest private-sector pension scheme has set its sights on companies that lack boardroom diversity as figures show that men still win three-quarters of directorships at the world’s biggest companies.

The Universities Superannuation Scheme, which manages £64bn on behalf of 420,000 academics and higher education workers, has updated its voting policy for next spring’s season of annual meetings.

The fund said it would vote against or abstain from voting for members of the board’s nomination committee if a company had no female directors and had no time set to introduce them. If the company made no progress in subsequent years, USS said it would vote against board chairs.

The move follows similar policy changes from heavyweight investors such as Legal & General Investment Management and the Church Investors Group, a coalition of 72 religious groups. USS is the first large UK pension investor to take such a stance.

www.ft.com
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New super fund for women offers ethical investment promises and halts fees during parental leave #VerveSuper

“We want to revolutionise what superannuation means to women. So that will involve education and creating communities to support our members. It also means allowing our members to invest collectively to support companies and industries building a world women want.”


AUSTRALIA - Verve Super, backed by Future Super, has launched today with a promise to challenge the existing superannuation system by helping more women close the retirement savings gap, particularly those who take career breaks to have children.

The launch coincides with a rising trend in financial services to target women through products that go beyond “pink washing,” in light of expectations that increased workforce participation will lead to greater wealth, financial independence and demand for products that address problems like the gender pay or retirement savings gap.

But to date the challenge for the finance industry in reaching women has been one of engagement, which has not been helped recently by some damning reports of misconduct from the Banking Royal Commission.

The Financy Women’s Index shows that the average woman retires with 66 per cent of the account balance of the average man, largely due to taking time out of full-time work to care for children.

www.womensagenda.com.au
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Mindshift Capital, Global Ventures and Flat6Labs pledge to invest $70 million in MENA-based women-founded startups by 2020

The Billion Dollar Fund aims to tackle the gender funding gap for women-founded startups


The Billion Dollar Fund, a recently launched consortium of venture funds that aims to tackle the gender funding gap for women-founded startups, has secured $70 million in pledges by UAE’s Mindshift Capital and Global Ventures, and Cairo-based Flat6Labs, the consortium announced today in a statement.

Founded by Shelly Porges, Sarah Chen, Anousheh Ansari, Nadereh Chamlou and Anu Jain, TBDF was launched last month, and has been able to secure more than $500 million in pledges until now. The consortium wants to empower female entrepreneurs worldwide. TBDF is trying to strengthen its global footprint and expanding their investor base by tapping into the new markets including MENA and and mobilizing the local investor scene to gender-diversify their portfolios.

“We are investing in women-led tech companies in the MENA region because they deliver high financial returns and are often undervalued. Arab women entrepreneurs represent an integral part of founders in the region and tend to build businesses around problems that they face in their lives. As a women-led fund manager based in the region, we understand and value these oppportunities.” said Heather Henyon, Founding General Partner of Mindshift Capital.

The statement highlights that only 14% of the entrepreneurs in the Middle East and North Africa (according to a study by ArabNet) are women compared to a global average of 17%.

www.menabytes.com
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Women-to-Women Business Fund Comes to Britain - SheEO #womeninvest

More than 300 women in Britain wrote to SheEO asking it to launch there, Saunders said ahead of a visit to London where she hopes that 500 female investors will come on board.


LONDON — A women-to-women investment fund is coming to Britain next month to boost financing for female-owned businesses, its founder said Thursday, as efforts grow to close the gender investing gap.

SheEO has lent more than $2 million to 32 female social entrepreneurs in the United States, Canada and New Zealand to grow their businesses since 2015 in an attempt to address a global gender investment gap.

“Most of the people writing checks and investing are men,” founder Vicki Saunders told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “SheEO wants to fund female innovators with great ideas to create stronger communities and a better world.”

www.voanews.com
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How Women are Bringing Impact Investing to the Mainstream #ImpactInvesting

Profits, meet purpose. Companies are being asked to serve a social purpose, here’s how women are positioning impact investing as a mainstream strategy.


Leaders like BlackRock CEO Larry Fink have taken notice. In his annual letter to CEOs this year, Fink wrote: “Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.” Some on Wall Street say that Fink’s message sets a tipping point for the whole investment industry.

Demand is clearly growing for investments that factor in better environmental, social, or governance (ESG) performance, and statistics show they can deliver profits and long-term stability. The proof is in the figures: The MSCI KLD 400 Social Index, a capitalization-weighted index of 400 U.S. securities that provides exposure to companies with outstanding ESG, reports that its annualized returns (over a 20-year period ending January 31, 2018) were 5.46 percent, slightly better than the S&P 500’s 5.43 percent over the same period.

Certainly, it is hard not to find an investment firm that offers funds focused on companies engaged in such practices as promoting clean energy or creating a more inclusive workforce. And strong interest from women investors, particularly millennials, has the potential to add as much as $22 trillion to investments in conscious capitalism, according to estimates from the impact-investing firm Swell Investing. That would greatly increase the existing pool of nearly $9 trillion.

All of these strategies fall under the umbrella of sustainable investing or impact investing, though impact investing can also refer to projects or companies designed to produce a specific social impact on a large or small scale. Jessica Huang, director of sustainable investing at BlackRock in San Francisco, has another take, however: “Eventually, it won’t be called sustainable investing,” she says, “it will just be called investing, with ESG as a material driver of risk and returns.”

www.robbreport.com
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