Called it: "Fearless Girl" was compensatory signalling

Back in April I expressed scepticism about the motivation behind the "Fearless Girl" statue placed in front of the Wall Street Bull by asset manager State Street:

I suspect that nothing other than their marketing department's desperate desire for publicity and their CEO's self-image were the main factors behind the project: since only 5 of their 28-strong leadership team are female, two of whom are in the traditional female bastions of HR and Compliance, one suspects that this is compensatory signalling.

Oh look:

State Street Corp., the $2.6 trillion asset manager that installed the Fearless Girl statue on Wall Street, agreed to settle U.S. allegations that it discriminated against hundreds of female executives by paying them less than male colleagues.

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. Heck, I have a heart of stone and nearly split my sides when I read about this.

This is interesting though:

State Street also recently launched its SPDR Gender Diversity exchange-traded fund, which focuses on firms that have greater gender diversity in senior leadership.

It will be fascinating to see how this does against comparable benchmarks over the next five years. It certainly doesn't seem to be the case that female leadership is necessarily a good thing for a company, and women in key board level positions have been associated with some fairly prominent failures.