
Please try another search
By Chibuike Oguh
(Reuters) - Nearly 50 buyout firms and investors have signed a global initiative that aims to improve diversity and inclusion among their ranks, a U.S. private equity investor association said on Monday.
The move comes as Wall Street tries to shake off its male- and white-dominated image. Only about a fifth of the employees in the alternative asset management industry are women, a Preqin survey found in February.
About 46 private equity firms and investors, including Blackstone Group (NYSE:BX) Inc, KKR & Co (NYSE:KKR) Inc, France-based Ardian, Canada's CPP Investments and the Teacher Retirement System of Texas, are founding signatories to the initiative launched by the Institutional Limited Partners Association. The Washington, D.C.-based ILPA represents many large public and private pension funds, endowments, family offices and foundations.
Many companies have launched diversity initiatives this year following the death of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis who died while in police custody on May 25. Floyd's death sparked protests in the United States and beyond.
Under the ILPA initiative, participating private equity firms and investors are required to adopt a public diversity and inclusion statement or strategy, track internal statistics on hiring and promotion by gender and diversity, specify organizational goals to attain more inclusive recruitment and retention, and provide data to investors making new commitments during fundraising.
The initiative also calls for providing unconscious bias training for employees, tracking gender and race statistics among portfolio companies, and assigning a senior manager to be accountable for diversity and inclusion.
"Beyond work from home, 2020 was a catalytic year which sparked a different kind of conversation that brought a lot of issues to fore around culture, which is essentially diversity and inclusion," said Jennifer Choi, ILPA's managing director for industry affairs.
ILPA said it expects to welcome more signatories from private equity firms and institutional investors. It will begin publishing a quarterly analysis of actions taken by signatories on diversity and inclusion next year.
Are you sure you want to block %USER_NAME%?
By doing so, you and %USER_NAME% will not be able to see any of each other's Investing.com's posts.
%USER_NAME% was successfully added to your Block List
Since you’ve just unblocked this person, you must wait 48 hours before renewing the block.
I feel that this comment is:
Thank You!
Your report has been sent to our moderators for review
Add a Comment
We encourage you to use comments to engage with other users, share your perspective and ask questions of authors and each other. However, in order to maintain the high level of discourse we’ve all come to value and expect, please keep the following criteria in mind:
Enrich the conversation, don’t trash it.
Stay focused and on track. Only post material that’s relevant to the topic being discussed.
Be respectful. Even negative opinions can be framed positively and diplomatically. Avoid profanity, slander or personal attacks directed at an author or another user. Racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination will not be tolerated.
Perpetrators of spam or abuse will be deleted from the site and prohibited from future registration at Investing.com’s discretion.