Special Guest Helena Morrissey, LGIM's Head of Personal Investing, Discusses Role Investors Can Play In Driving More Gender-Equal Boards Across The Globe
CHICAGO, IL / ACCESSWIRE / June 13, 2019 / Legal & General Investment Management America (LGIMA), an investment solutions provider with nearly $191 billion in assets under management, hosted a dynamic event earlier this week featuring Dame Helena Morrissey, head of personal investing at Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) and author of A Good Time to be a Girl, Don't Lean In, Change the System. Hosted by the LGIMA Women's Collective, the event included a Q&A led by John Hoeppner, LGIMA's head of US stewardship and sustainable investments, and covered topics such as corporate governance, gender equality, diverse leadership and the firm's global leadership in advancing sustainable investing issues.
Key takeaways from the event included:
- Opportunities and challenges of being a female leader in the finance industry
- The impact of the 30% Club, founded by Dame Helena, including reaching the target of 30% women on the top 100 U.K. listed company boards in 2018 (from 12.5% in 2010), and reducing the number of all-male boards across Britain's top 350 companies from 173 to two
- Actionable insights as promoted in Morrissey's "Own Your World" campaign, the Legal & General Future World Gender in Leadership UK Index (GIRL) fund and her book A Good Time to be a Girl
- Comparing and contrasting the state of gender equality initiatives in the U.S. and U.K.
"As one of the world's leading investment companies, it's our responsibility to continue having open discussions around the evolving investment landscape, and who better to explore this topic with than an industry powerhouse like Helena," Hoeppner said. "It was a pleasure to participate in such an insightful conversation around some of today's most important corporate governance issues, including diversity in leadership and responsible investing."
Morrissey holds a successful career in investment management spanning more than 30 years in the industry. She helped launch the GIRL fund which invests in U.K. equities and favors those companies which have achieved higher levels of gender diversity - the first of its kind in Britain. The fund marked its one-year anniversary recently by showing that diversity scores have improved on average 8% and outperformed the FTSE 350 benchmark by 1.5%.
"I was delighted to be part of this conversation with LGIMA, their clients and community," Morrissey said. "The world is in a state of upheaval; businesses and countries need leaders who can emotionally connect, who can inspire rather than force. That creates an unprecedented opportunity to achieve a real breakthrough in gender equality - a subject that has frustrated many, especially in recent years. We need to think less in terms of fitting women into the existing ways of working and leading, and more in terms of enabling us to contribute to a new approach."
For more information on this event, and on LGIMA's corporate social responsibility and environmental, social and governance efforts, visit http://www.lgima.com/.
ABOUT LGIMA: Legal & General Investment Management America, Inc. (LGIMA) is a registered investment advisor specializing in designing and managing investment solutions across active fixed income, index strategies, multi-asset, liability driven investment, and sustainable investment strategies for the US institutional market. With nearly $191 billion in assets under management as of March 30, 2019, LGIMA is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Legal & General Investment Management US (Holdings) Inc., which is in turn, wholly owned by Legal & General Investment Management (Holdings) Ltd. (LGIM(H)). LGIM(H) also owns our affiliates Legal & General Investment Management Ltd. and LGIM International Ltd. Legal & General's worldwide assets under management are approximately $1.3 trillion as of December 31, 2018. For more information on LGIMA, visit http://www.lgima.com/ .
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SOURCE: Legal & General Investment Management America