New York Times (February 16)
“Fearing Trump, Wall Street sounds a retreat on diversity efforts.” Seemingly everybody is rushing to ensure “they don’t wind up in the cross hairs of the Trump administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion.” Among those scurrying away from DEI are “white-collar investment banks, consultancies, mutual funds and stock exchanges. The latest was Goldman Sachs, which said on Tuesday that it would drop a quota that forced corporate boards of directors to include women and members of minority groups.”
Tags: Consultancies, Corporate boards, Cross hairs, DEI, Directors, Diversity, Equity, Fear, Goldman Sachs, Inclusion, Investment banks, Minority groups, Mutual funds, Quota, Retreat, Stock exchanges, Trump, Wall Street, White collar, Women
Financial Times (November 21)
“We’ve been sceptical of the asset management craze for ESG…. So it’s only fair that we highlight some intriguing work that shows that just maybe some of all this is actually having a clear, measurable and positive impact.” Female representation on U.S. corporate boards remains low, but “grew by over 50 per cent in 2016-19, going from a pretty pathetic 13.1 per cent of directors to a still-bad-but-much better 19.7 per cent.” Some attribute “this to the role played by the passive investment industry’s ‘Big Three’ — BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street — which started to very publicly make a lot of noise about this issue a few years back.”
Tags: “Big Three”, 2016-19, Asset management, BlackRock, Corporate boards, Craze, Directors, ESG, Female representation, Measurable, Passive investment, Positive impact, Sceptical, State Street, U.S., Vanguard
Institutional Investor (August 2)
“What do we mean when we say socially responsible investing?” Environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) investing has been growing in popularity, but there is little agreement over how the social aspect should be reported by companies. There is, however, a push for companies to “do a better job of both considering and reporting on their social impacts…. less emphasis should be put on social outputs (for example, the number of bed nets provided to prevent malaria), and more on social impacts (the result or change that is a consequence of the outcome).” Social reporting is still in its infancy, much as environmental reporting was decades ago. In the future, it will be “important for companies to move the social impacts discussion up several notches to the board level, so that it can permeate all aspects of operations.”
Tags: Corporate boards, ESG, Social impacts, Social reporting, SRI
