Individual critique
Fearless Girl
By Stephen Tisdalle, Chief Marketing Officer, State Street Global Advisors
!mage 1.6 Fearless Girl was part of an integrated marketing campaign Photo: Sculpture by Kristen Visbaf; commissioned by State Street Global Advisors.
To say that the tremendous success of the Fearless Girl campaign was unexpected to us at State Street Global Advisors would be an understatement. After all it’s not often that a B2B financial services brand is involved in a big viral marketing campaign. In fact, we originally applied for a permit to keep the Fearless Girl statue installed in New York for just seven days. While we knew this had the potential to be an impact ful campaign, we didn’t fully anticipate the scale of the viral spread or that, more than a year after launch, her impact and influence would still be expanding.
The story of Fearless Girl begins with a simple truth: research shows that companies with women in leader ship outperform those without.i Yet, women continue to be under-represented in senior leadership roles. In 2017, one in four Russell 3000 Index companies did not have a single woman on their board.ii
Taking a bold stand for change
As the world’s third largest asset manager, respon sible for investing approximately $2.5 trillion’ii on behalf of our clients across the globe, State Street Global Advisors pays close attention to these statis tics. For us, encouraging companies in our investment portfolio to adopt good governance practices – including increasing board diversity – is a means to drive long-term value of clients’ investments.
After launching a gender diversity index and exchange-traded fund (ETF) in 2016, offering the ability to invest in companies with a strong track record of promoting women to senior leadership positions, in 2017 our leaders decided to take the bold step of calling on portfolio companies to increase the number of women on their boards. As
