Amid growing concern about the lack of diversity on corporate boards and in the C-level executive suite, some money managers are developing products that focus on the benefits of women in top-tier leadership roles.
The Barclays Women in Leadership ETN (NYSEArca: WIL), which debuted earlier this week, is newest addition to the lineup of investment products that focus on companies with women in important leadership roles.
WIL tracks the Barclays Women in Leadership Total Return USD Index, which only includes companeis that either feature a female chief executive officer or have a corporate board this comprised of at least 25% women, according to Barclays.
Top-10 holdings in WIL include PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP) and Dow components Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), General Electric (NYSE: GE) and International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM). However, of WIL’s top-10 holdings, only Pepsi and IBM have female CEO while Yahoo (NasdaqGS: YHOO) and Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) are surprisingly absent from that group.
ETNs are debt instruments. An issuing financial institution promises to pay ETN investors a return on a benchmark index before the ETN matures. Additionally, some ETNs provide current distributions to investors. Since ETNs are a type of debt security, investors must be cognizant of the issuing bank’s credit worthiness. [ETNs Hauling in Assets]
Well-known ETNs include the JPMorgan Alerian MLP Index ETN (NYSEArca: AMJ), the ETRACS Alerian MLP Infrastructure Index ETN (NYSEArca: MLPI) and the iPath MSCI India Index ETN (NYSEArca: INP).