Building a Diverse Investment Management Staff
| MIE Racial Equity Library |
Beyond the long-overdue need for justice, evidence suggests that companies with more diverse leadership are correlated with those that have reported better financial performance. Yet financial services industries have been slower than other industries to change. This post offers an evolving list of resources for foundations seeking to examine their investment staffing.
Takeaways
- Collecting data on the level of diversity among staff and other decision-makers can help spark discussions and goals. (See essays by The California Endowment and W.K. Kellogg Foundation in MIE's Stanford Social Innovation Review series for more about how these organizations shifted their overall staff compositions, including investment staff.)
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Foundations manage their endowments in a variety of ways, such as using an entirely outsourced Chief Investment Officer (CIO); partially outsourcing their decision-making by using an advisory firm that provides CIO services, selects fund managers, and/or researches investment opportunities; or hiring an individual or team in-house that selects fund managers and makes investing decisions. Organizations can consider diversity, equity, and inclusion among all of these internal and outsourced functions.
- Consider how to integrate goals into Investment Policy Statements and adding conversations and goals around diversity, equity, and inclusion to investment committee meetings.
- This page is evolving: if you have ideas to share, please contact us! To learn more about how organizations are considering diversity across their overall team—beyond the investment staff— and among their asset managers, visit MIE's Racial Equity Library.
Forging Ahead: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Foundation Investing Activities
This report, produced by The Giving Practice, highlights ways that foundations are considering racial equity in the staffing and management structure of the endowment. The authors interviewed 13 people who are either CEOs or senior investing staff members at the foundations for this report. Most of these foundations manage close to or more than $1 billion in assets, and all are actively implementing DEI initiatives across foundation operations. The report also explores how foundations can consider diversity, equity, and inclusion in vendor selection and procurement.
The California Endowment's Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Audit
This audit presents an analysis of The California Endowment's (TCE) progress associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion. In addition to providing a demographic analysis of staff, board, and grantees, the report examines previous activities, assessments of progress on goals, and further recommendations. Dr. Robert Ross and Amy Chung of TCE also discuss this audit among other investment related activities in this essay, part of a series on impact investing and racial equity in Stanford Social Innovation Review.)
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