SHE: The ETF That Trades on Female Empowerment

当克里斯·艾尔曼的三个女儿之一，一个数学和哲学专业，在美国国家航空航天局纪念时，她叫她爸爸说，这是妇女在工作活动中占人群的一半。尽管如此，光泽烧毁了：在空间机构，妇女主要是支持角色，而男性是工程师。艾尔曼，首席投资官CALSTR.向加利福尼亚教师提供养老金，强调，失望足以让他的女儿越过美国潜在雇主名单。

I was interviewing Ailman andKristi Mitchem, an executive vice president at State Street Global Advisors, who coincidentally also has three daughters, the day in early March that the duo rang the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate the launch of a new exchange-traded fund. The ETF tracks an index of companies in which women are well represented in senior leadership. The idea is that these firms will outperform and exhibit less volatility than their less female-inspired peers. (Mitchem has since taken a bit of her own advice, that women should shoot high, and on June 1 will start as president and CEO of Wells Fargo Asset Management.)

CALSTRS在SSGA的ETF中投入了2.5亿美元作为锚的投资者。克里斯蒂说，当建议etf的名称时，他们会发现它是否被采取。SSGA首先为基金公司提供了与学校合作的慈善机构的收入百分比，以消除使女孩远离科学，技术和数学职业的偏见。

When I first heard of the ETF, I was dismissive of the idea. It’s hard, however, to ignore the evidence of how underrepresented women are in corporate America, and I’d like to see that change.

然而，与此同时，我常常持怀疑措施，这些程序的疗效升级性别多样性。And I know I’m going to get some colorful comments for this — but it’s hard to believe that women manage all that differently from men or that they would have helped businesses steer clear of risks such as those that led to the late-2000s financial crisis or environmental disasters likeBP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

But I respect Ailman and Mitchem. Last year I采访了一个视频系列的Ailman亚慱体育appwe were producing about the importance of character in choosing asset managers. Not just because seeking that quality is the right thing to do, but because investors who have admirable character traits like patience, persistence and the fortitude to hold contrarian opinions in the face of opposition deliver better results. I’ve known Mitchem since her days at Barclays Global Investors. (Sadly, her spokeswoman who introduced us in the 2000s, Annette Bronkesh, passed away last month.)

艾尔曼对角色和投资的看法与他对SSGA开发的指数进行了一致。他不是为了因为它是正确的方式而投资。它必须赚钱。

“I can’t give up returns,” says Ailman. Mitchem tells me that the methodology focuses on the top 1,000 stocks in the U.S., ranking them on the number of women in senior leadership positions, the number of women on the board and the number of women in the C-suite. SSgA then constructs an index based on these scores that is sector neutral.

What Mitchem thinks is different about her index is not just that it includes companies that may have a female CEO or even companies with gender diversity among the board. The real difference in this collection of companies is that there are women dotted throughout senior leadership.

当她说，“当她说，”妇女和男子平衡的妇女和男子团队一起致决定，我正在搭载SSGA的思考。“我对Groupthink了解足以知道它有多危险。谁不爱生活在一个地区或为一家公司工作，每个人都像你一样，喝同样的啤酒并抨击同一个政治家？邻居中的每个人 - 或者在项目团队中 - 正在向合唱团讲道，直到产品演示失败或图表上的客户获取线路的那一刻。

Ailman, whose board started pushing in 2003 for increased gender diversity within the money management companies that oversaw its investments, spoke as part of a panel on the topic at the Milken Institute Global Conference two years ago. A year later he sat on another panel, that time with Mitchem. “It was a year later, but the movement was still minute!” he says. Ailman had been studying different methodologies to isolate companies with gender diversity, but he didn’t like anything — until SSgA’s idea. CalSTRS’ investment in the ETF is part of the portfolio’s enhanced index allocation.

I asked Mitchem to talk about the limitations in other methods of assessing companies based on the roles and proportion of women. She goes back to SSgA’s process, which scores companies on three different measures. “You can’t judge a company based on having a woman CEO. That’s one person. And boards don’t run companies,” she rattles off. Ailman jumps in: “A team whose members have the same education, the same background, makes catastrophic mistakes. No one in the room is asking, ‘Why are we doing this’?” he says. I think to my own example of living in a ZIP code characterized by a very particular demographic: the New Jersey suburbs. We throw the best parties, but we never believe our stuff stinks.

当我们打包袋,所以Mitchem and Ailman could get on their way to the bell ringing, Ailman reiterates his points about wanting to gather people who truly think differently. He says men think linearly, whereas women can often be better at taking random facts and connecting them into a coherent picture. “We live in complicated times for markets,” he adds. “Our teams have to integrate obscure sets of data, jumping from China toBrexit.，一直回到美国。“

虽然这种方法已经被回到了测试，但当然，艾尔曼在这一点上预测ETF的任何表现都是谨慎的。“但是，”他继续，“我预测较少的波动。”

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