IMPACT Newsletter – September 2021

This week is National Inclusion Week and October is Global Diversity Awareness month, we thought in this month’s newsletter we would share with you key takeaways for you and your networks.

 

Last week we attended the NLI Diversity & Inclusion Webinar, focusing on ‘active inclusion’. If you are not actively including, you are probably accidently excluding. Think about it in the terms of asking people to dance, rather than just inviting them to the party.

 

Inclusive teams perform better – they work harder and have greater overall social intelligence. By adding one female to an all-male group it raises the social intelligence by 40%. We also found out that feeling excluded actually hurts! It has a physical effect on our brains. Something as simple as leaving someone off an email trail or embarrassing them, will register in a part of the brain. Your brain will read this as a threat and under threat you cannot be creative, collaboration goes out of the window and essentially you cannot do your best work.

 

However, there are habits and strategies we can adopt to create inclusion more quickly – these include:

 

  • Find common ground – be warm, curious, interested in others
  • Lift people up – make it safe for others to speak up, ask for contributions from everyone
  • Create clarity (it’s critical for our brains) – share information and keep people in the loop, explain your choices and give people a feeling of control

 

 

We would also love you to take part in our poll by clicking the link here. We are keen to know how important the option of hybrid working is to our candidates in their job search.  This is forming part of a larger project for IMPACT. We want to see what is important to you, so we can address this with our clients, design our events around this and ultimately help to move the dial. All this depends on your contribution, please do take a moment.

 

I hope you enjoy reading my pick of articles from the month below!

 

Latest diversity data in Asset Management

The majority of key professional positions at asset management firms around the world are largely held by white men, at 54.07 per cent, according to data supplied by these firms to eVestment. 

The second largest group of key professionals are Asian men, at 12.44 per cent, followed by white women at 9.11 per cent. Black males only make up 1.73 per cent of key asset management professionals and black women make up just 0.55 per cent of key asset management professionals.

Read More

 

Charter to force pension schemes to ask about gender and diversity 

The UK’s largest workplace pension scheme Nest has joined forces with the Church of England Pension Board to sign up to a new charter committing them to screen their investments taking account of gender and ethnicity diversity.

It marks a significant step towards tackling the asset management industry’s serial image problem, namely, that they’re all male, pale and stale.

Read More

 

Why there are too few women in P&L positions

This article addresses why women are not in P&L positions and links it to the fact that there is an issue around STEM subjects not being cool subjects to study at school.

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Good study by CityWire

So while the percentage of women in the Citywire fund manager database has nudged up from 10.3% in 2016 to 11.8% in 2021, the number of mixed teams has almost doubled.

A slight acceleration in the overall numbers of women fund managers means that gender parity will be reached in 127 years, down from 200 years highlighted in the 2020 report. However, if the modest pick-up in the rate of change over the past 12 months continues, that time could be further cut to 48 years.

Read More

 

Spotlight on Women in Investments – Mentors

In this episode of Spotlight on Women In Investment Management, the panel covers what a good mentoring relationship looks like and the many benefits having a mentor has on professional and personal development. It also touches on if it matters if your mentor is male or female. You can either watch it here or listen to it here.

 

The world’s most valuable, female-led start-up

Australian graphic design company Canva is a rarity even among the $10 billion-plus start-ups. On Tuesday, the company announced that it had raised $200 million in funding, valuing it at an eye-watering $40 billion. Not only does that crown the company as the world’s most valuable software start-up, it mints the business as the world’s most valuable female-founded and female-led start-up.

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Salomon Sisters

It’s no secret that the American investment banks are a tough place for women, and men, requesting hybrid or flexible working.

Enter ‘Salomon Sisters’; the code name given for the first female led investment bank, Independence Point Advisors. Run by Anne Clarke Wolff, who was most recently the chair of Bank of America Corp.

With so much sell side talent ripe for picking, I wonder if there will be a different and more attractive culture?

Side note:  On googling her name to fact check, the second most searched item was ‘Anne Clarke Wolff husband’…typical!

Read More

 

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