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).
Stocks in WIL’s underlying index “also have to satisfy certain market capitalization, liquidity and other selection criteria and concentration limits,” according to Barclays.
Last month, former Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) Sallie Krawcheck “launched the Pax Ellevate Global Women’s Index Fund – co-branded with the Ellevate professional women’s network, formerly known as 85 Broads,” reports Michael Leibel for Reuters.
That fund holds shares of Dow components 3M (NYSE: MMM) and American Express (NYSE: AXP) along with General Mills (NYSE: GIS), among others.
Graphs Courtesy: Barclays
ETF Trends editorial team contributed to this post.