The Fearless Girl is Actually A Fearless Latina …. and Also a Unicorn
The Fearless Girl, a by now well-known bronze statue of a young and defiant girl locked in a perpetual stare-down with the Wall Street Charging Bull, has inspired a spectrum of reactions since she made her debut in downtown Manhattan on the eve of International Women’s Day. While some feel that the statue is a brazen marketing ploy by State Street, a large asset manager (it has been suggested that she has earned a whopping $7.4m in free media for the firm), many others have seen her as an emboldening and inspiring figure. On Wednesday, Ad Age gave us another reason to look toward the Fearless Girl as an emblem of change — not only is she a woman, she is also a minority. She is actually meant to be Latina.
YES.
Ad Age writes that the President of McCann XBC noted that they meant for the “Fearless Girl to be Latina so that she was universal and so she could “be an inspiration for everybody — fathers who have little girls and husbands who have wives [people who are] white, black, Indian — it should speak to the broadest audience.”
This is no small thing, considering the paucity of women and people of color on Wall Street. A May 3rd report commissioned by the John S. and James L.Knight Foundation reported that women and minorities manage only 1.1% of the industry’s $71.4 trillion assets. Let that sink in for a second …..1% and TRILLION with a T. People representing, uh, the majority demographics of the ENTIRE GLOBE are only managing 1.1% (sorry, I forgot those ten extra basis points there, really moves the needle…..) of trillions of dollars. Oh and it gets better! The article goes on to note that only 5.2% and 3.8% of mutual funds are owned by women and minorities respectively. And in the hedge fund industry “women and minorities manage less than 1% of the industry’s assets.”
Why is this? Thestar.com writes:
The disparity is likely rooted in a perception that investing with women or minorities is riskier, industry officials say. When a company or university is looking to increase its diversity, it may reflexively hire an African-American-owned firm for construction work but not to manage its money, said John Rogers, founder of Ariel Capital Management, the largest minority-run mutual fund firm in the United States.
“Close your eyes and picture an investment banker and what comes back is a white male that looks like George Clooney,” Rogers said.
Women and minorities are also less likely to have the connections to raise enough money to start their own firms, industry officials said.
“People do business with people who they have built relationships with. People of colour have had less opportunities to build these multi-generational relationships that lead to business opportunities,” Rogers said. “Our community hasn’t been as exposed to the financial services careers . . . We don’t have the grandfather to leave us money and to talk about the stock market at the dinner table.”
I am not going to bother to state the obvious that THIS MUST CHANGE because it is BAD FOR BUSINESS, BAD FOR INVESTORS, and CONTRIBUTES TO INCOME INEQUALITY for women and POCs. Give me a moment to adjust my glasses and maybe smash a Bloomberg keyboard.
Phew.
Ok, anyway, back to our Fearless Girl, who we now know is going to eventually grow up to be a minority AND a woman. Inspiring and educating students of color and little girls to pursue and understand these jobs in the first place is one of the first hurdles to alleviating these inequalities, and at the very least, seeing a representation like the Fearless (Latina) Girl is a baby step in the right direction. Given the dismal numbers for women and people of color in asset management quoted above, at the current rate, should that little girl make it into one of those Wall Street (they should probably move her to Midtown..just sayin’) offices she stands beneath, she would basically have to be a unicorn. Perhaps that is why her creator thought it was a fair fight to pit her against that bull in the first place.
