International Women’s Day 2021: Choose to Challenge

Today is International Women’s Day an annual global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women. The day has been celebrated since 1911 and also marks a call to action for accelerating gender parity. 

Each year, International Women’s Day celebrates a different theme, this year’s theme is Choose to Challenge. A challenged world is an alert world – and from challenge comes change. 

Already this year amidst the chaos of the pandemic we have seen some major achievements for women in the finance industry. Bumble’s (NASDAQ:BMBL) founder and CEO, Whitney Wolfe Herd became the youngest woman to take a company public and the FCA hired an all women team to repair their reputation after the various savings scandals. 

But despite this progress we still have a long way to go. In the UK there are still more funds managed by men called Dave than there are female fund managers in total. The FTSE 100 has only six female CEOs and 62% of married women leave long-term financial decisions to their partners. If we are to see shifts in these areas, it will take a collective effort to challenge the status quo. 

We have prepared a series of posts to mark International Women’s Day, each focused on a different area that highlights and supports women in investment and finance. The first of these, which focuses on female leaders in the small-cap world, has been published today but please keep a look out in our newsletter as we will publish more throughout the week.