Diversity – Feature THE PANEL
Candice Bocle ESG product specialist at Carmignac
Clare Payn
Senior global ESG and diversity manager at Legal & General Investment Management
Lydia Guett Investment director, sustainable and impact investing group at Cambridge Associates
Sachin Bhatia Head of UK core institutional and consultants at Invesco; and co-chair of the race and ethnicity workstream at the Diversity Project
has been fantastically well received given the results we have seen from our recent campaign.”
Goodwill diversity Bhatia said that while there have been some changes that have been pushed for, there also has been a great deal of willingness from the investment world to accept the importance of the issue. “Coming at it from the industry-wide perspective, what we have seen over the past few years has been a lot of goodwill, emphasis and understanding that we needed to move the nee- dle on ethnicity, diversity and inclusion.” He then highlighted some campaigns he has been responsible for and the aims they have to make change. “At the Diversity Project we have had the Talk About Black campaign and the race and ethnicity workstream, which are key tenets of raising awareness around the experiences of people from different ethnicities. We had a campaign called Fish Out of Water, where people were sharing short stories about their lived experience. “We are exploring how someone’s religion and culture can impact on their career and intersectionality, where the differ- ent aspects of you as an individual will have a different impact on how your life experience will be in the workplace, and finally, work progression. There are a lot of initiatives around career progression, from the grassroots where there are 10,000 black interns and the CityHive mentoring scheme.” Returning to his original point, he qualifies this: “One of the key things that have been apparent is there is a lot of good intention, a lot of good will, but importantly, a lack of data. Until you have the data, you cannot understand where the gaps are, where the weaknesses are and where the fixes are needed.”
Therefore, Bhatia is pushing for the 90% Campaign. “What we are aiming for across the industry is for all firms over the next two years to disclose 90% of the ethnicity data for their work- force. The work we are doing at the moment is trying to under- stand where there have been success stories with firms with that high participation rate.” The average is currently 50% to 60%. “At Invesco we are edg- ing 70%,” Bhatia said. “There are some firms closer to 90%, which is aspirational over the next two years to work towards. We then will have a better understanding of the ethnicity com- position of each workforce and be able to address some of the bottlenecks and issues connected with that.” Bringing the changing narrative back to investment, Guett added: “What we can control is the engagement with the asset managers. “Asset managers say: ‘There are not enough female investors.’ That is something we cannot accept. We need to build the pool for females to move up the ranks.” Bocle added though she has noticed a shift in discussing diver- sity. “We have moved away from a debate around ‘does diversity lead to better financial returns’, to it being the right thing to do to attract the best employees and address needs globally. We have made progress, but I acknowledge there is a long way to go, but it is getting better.”
Bocle also indicated how a new fund from Carmignac can help. “As part of the new social fund which will have two legs – one on employer engagement and the other on customer satisfac- tion – we address diversity indirectly. But importantly it is going to be data driven, so we will continue to engage with the industry and with companies themselves to improve our data- base and help move the needle for social data to catch up with environmental data and the social taxonomy within Europe. I am looking forward to engaging with companies on this.”
Issue 115 | July–August 2022 | portfolio institutional | 43
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52
