MarketsMuse post courtesy of extract from Investors Business Daily..Editors clipped original headline: “Wall Street Women Touch Each Other: BrokerDealer ETF Gals Form “WE”
“When you put 40 smart and gorgeous women together, great things will just happen,” said Linda Zhang, senior portfolio manager at Windhaven Investment Management in Boston.
Earlier this year, Zhang helped to found Women in ETFs (WE), a platform for women in the industry to connect, support and inspire each other. The idea came about after she ran into an old colleague — Joanne Hill, head of institutional investment strategy at ProShare Advisors — during an Inside ETFs conference in Florida in 2013.
“We looked around this huge conference, there were very few of us who were women,” said Zhang, who is WE’s vice president. “We were convinced there were other people like us. We thought perhaps we can start something.”
Zhang and Hill discussed their idea with Sue Thompson, head of institutional asset management and RIA for BlackRock. Thompson, an industry veteran, responded excitedly. Soon, others came on board: Michelle Mikos, ETF business development director at Invesco PowerShares, and Deborah Fuhr, managing partner at ETFGI, a research firm in London.
On July 31, WE announced its nine-member board of directors. Besides Zhang, it includes Thompson and Hill as co-presidents, Fuhr as external organization liaison, and Mikos as secretary. Industry legend and securities attorney Kathleen Moriarty — nicknamed “SPDR Woman” for her role in the SPDR S&P 500’s ( SPY ) debut in 1993 — also serves on the board.
In recent months, WE has organized professional development events and launched a website as well as a LinkedIn group . The organization now has chapters in Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington DC, Toronto, London, Paris and Frankfurt.
The Chicago chapter will launch in conjunction with the fifth annual Morningstar ETF Conference in that city on Sept. 17.
Read more: http://www.nasdaq.com/article/women-in-the-etf-industry-launch-a-group-of-their-own-cm381955#ixzz3AvkOuzeh