Investors can now bet on female-led companies

Barclays is selling an exchange-traded note tied to public companies with female executives, betting on demand for products that promote women in leadership.

The ETN tracks an index created by the London-based bank that follows the performance of US firms with a female chief executive officer or a board of directors that’s at least 25 per cent women, said Sue Meirs, Barclays’ chief operating officer for equity and funds structured-market sales. The Women in Leadership ETN will begin trading tomorrow.

Barclays joins a series of money managers creating similar products as attention grows on the lack of corporate diversity and the benefits of females in management. Women make up 4.8 per cent of chief executive officers and 16.9 per cent of board seats in Fortune 500 companies, according to New York-based Catalyst Inc. “There’s this large and growing pool of investors that have socially responsible mandates,” Meirs said. “We’re moving into this exchange-traded way of investing in diversity.”

Sallie Krawcheck, principal at Ellevate Asset Management, teamed up last month with Pax World Management , on an index fund focused on firms that advance women. The product is the successor to the Pax World Global Women's Equality Fund, which gained 24 per cent in the past year through July 7th, trailing 56 per cent of peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The Barclays index includes 83 US-based companies that are listed on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange and have at least $250 million in market capitalization, said Meirs, who is based in New York. Thirty-five have female CEOs including Ginni Rometty at IBM and Marissa Mayer at Yahoo!

ETNs are contracts between investors and banks that are less regulated than mutual funds. They are backed only by their issuer’s credit, unlike exchange-traded funds and mutual funds, which hold assets.

Bloomberg