The September 2019 Women & Finance Knowledge Circle presentation will be held on Thursday, September 12th at 2 pm ET.
Guess speakers Johanna Zielstra and Amy Cross will be presenting, "Gender Fair: A Lens for Investing and Working."
In this session, Johanna and Amy will discuss Gender Fair's proprietary gender lens, and how it can be used to evaluate companies and how it may relate to market performance. They will also highlight data on the highest performing Gender Fair companies.
Similar to the sustainability movement started decades ago, Gender Fair believes that “genderability” is the next wave of ESG. More and more, investors will demand a more detailed analysis of gender and diversity metrics. That demand is values-based, and is of course, also linked to financial performance which is proven to improve with more diverse teams who understand the modern market.
Those interested in diversity and inequality should be able to align their investment strategies with those beliefs. Bloomberg’s Gender Equality Index provides information on some companies that opt in to participate but Gender Fair has data on all publicly traded companies and can also linked be linked to the consumer. We say dollars make change.
Formerly with PwC and JPMorgan Chase, Johanna Zeilstra had a successful career in strategy and finance before becoming a social entrepreneur. After her MBA, she helped implement Canada’s pay equity legislation. As a social impact entrepreneur, she co-founded a philanthropic/ corporate social responsibility program, GiveBack which launched on Oprah in the final season, and in 2015 helped launch Signature Leaders, to expedite women into the C-Suite of Fortune 500 companies. In 2016, she started the non profit Women’s Debate to put women’s issues on the table during the presidential election. Since 2017, she has lead Gender Fair as CEO and runs a women entrepreneurs network of 300+ members.
Amy-Willard Cross is the founder of the Gender Fair Index. Foreign Policy named her a Global Thinker of 2015 for her work on “Economic Girl Power.” In 2016, she was invited to join the Clinton Global Initiative. Prior to that, Cross created a women’s news site, VITAMIN W Media whose rating of women's colleges eventually grew into Gender Fair ratings. For 20 years, Cross worked as an editor and writer for national publications in Canada and the U.S., writing features, essays, and reviews, as well as authoring two books and working on TV shows. In her 20s, she developed the first magazine for midlife women for the publishers of SHAPE. An honors graduate of Wellesley, she maintained the family tradition of attending women’s colleges since the 1880s.