Good Morning! STA WIF on women empowerment, Visit our webpage to learn more! and STAC's Women's Collective at the Annual Winter Meeting.
Career Development
Girl Heroes: The movement continues and there is more to accomplish.
Great change occurs with sustained effort over a long period of time. Over the past decades, the "girl power" movement is well documented, even if it is not centralized. Recently the shift is subtle yet equally impactful. Individuals and group voices continue to find their platforms on social media. Young women are being raised with different standards. There are more push backs when sexist commercials hit the public (GoDaddy, Ford/JWT Berlusconi...let's see if the Super Bowl ads again get a hair less sexist).
Howard Wolfson, co-chief strategist and communications director for Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign who now works for Bloomberg and is watching this one from the sidelines observes, "There was no equivalent of a show like Girls with a frank depiction of what it means to be female," he said. "There was no young woman carrying around the mattress at Columbia talking about issues of sexual violence, no Sheryl Sandberg pointing out that women are perceived differently when it comes to leadership, no Amy Schumer with a pop comedy show devoted to exposing sexism in the workplace and society. There is much more space for a conversation around gender discrimination and gender equality and just plain gender."
More relevant to our industry, out of the financial crisis the likes of Angela Merkel, Christine Lagarde, Elizabeth Warren and Janet Yellen have become common guests at the average household's table. Susan Schmidt Bies summarizes the current financial environment as follows, "The financial services industry continues to evolve to meet the challenges posed by emerging technologies and business processes, new financial instruments, the growing scale and scope of financial institutions, and changing regulatory frameworks. A successful ERM process can help an organization meet many of these challenges by providing a framework for managers to explicitly consider how risk exposures are changing, determine the amount of risk they are willing to accept, and ensure they have the appropriate risk mitigants and controls in place to limit risk to targeted levels." One such "risk mitigant" that continues to garner headlines is that of diversity in the workplace.
So to emphasize, now is the right time for STA WIF to be happening. We are doing this during a time in which it is commonplace to see like-minded gestures.
Thank you to Catharine Sheridan from Race Rock Capital for giving a stellar presentation on "Generating Alternative Alpha: An historical analysis and comparison to today's market environment." - Brought to STAC's Annual Mid Winter Meeing by the STAC Women's Collective
