Happy Monday:
Congratulations to our Fort Worth Chapter on their successful fundraiser luncheon last week. This event began 2 years ago with 50 attendees and last week, it graduated to the ballroom of the City Club with over 200 in attendance. Huge thanks to our speakers and sponsors for making this a memorable event. We will have photos and a video on the website soon!
To begin, an FT article detailed the extreme lack of diversity in hedge funds with only 4.3% of companies having at least 25% female ownership and funds led by women running less than 1% of industry assets in spite of dramatic outperformance. To quote: “Only 439 hedge funds employ a female portfolio manager, compared with 9,081 that employ a male in the same position.” Happily, larger hedge fund managers led by Man Group and DE Shaw are leading the way towards remedying the problem. The full article can be found here.
At this Fall’s Dealbook conference, Mellody Hobson, president of $12.5 billion asset manager Ariel Capital asked other asset managers who would be the one to ‘take a knee’ for corporate diversity. So, what would that look like? Ms. Hobson noted that it would include “putting a stake in numbers; establishing benchmarks and making people accountable with incentives or penalties.” Laurence Fink, Chairman and CEO of Blackrock added that “we have to force behaviors.” The full article can be found here.
Forbes released its annual list of the 100 most powerful women in the world and Business Insider profiled the top nine. The Business Insider list may be found here.
Kudos to Austin-based technology incubator Capital Factory on their ingenious idea to promote diversity at start-ups. The firm is offering $100,000 in the form of a funding challenge, but to be considered, applicants must have at least one woman or person of color on the executive team. The full article can be found here.
Assets focused in gender lens investing have surged from just $100 million in 2014 to over $2.2 billion today. These strategies focus on improving the lives of women, closing the gender pay gap and adding women to boards and company management. The full article can be found here.
It seems this is money well-invested. According to a Citigroup study, addressing the factors excluding women from the workforce, including unpaid care work, gender discrimination and violence, would boost OECD growth by a whopping 6-20%. The full article can be found here.
Thank you for making time for reading our blog this week and for your support year round. We wish you and yours all the best for a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.
We have some terrific events lined up for you the last two months of the year and we look forward to seeing you all at an event in 2017! To learn more about our 2017 and 2018 events, please visit www.txwsw.com.
Kind regards
Christine