Special Projects of the President

Special Projects of the President are unique efforts led by Ruth Shaber, MD, President and Founder of the Tara Health Foundation, to develop and advance initiatives rooted in Ruth’s experience and expertise.

Who We Are

The Diverse Investing Collective is an initiative currently incubated at the Tara Health Foundation to accelerate progress toward having more women and people of color at financial decision-making tables investing more assets, not only because it’s the right thing to do, but because the evidence shows gender-diverse and racially-diverse teams deliver higher returns.

Our Origin: Ruth Shaber, President of the Tara Health Foundation, and Patience Marime-Ball, CEO of Women of the World Endowment, both spent their careers in health care and finance respectively using the best evidence to make decisions. In 2020 they came together to examine the literature on what happens when women are brought to financial decision-making tables and they found - from VC firms with more women partners experiencing increased returns, to new companies with a female founder performing 63% better than those with all-male teams, to gender-inclusive teams being 21% more likely to see outperformance - across asset classes, when women are part of financial decisions returns are higher and risk is lower. They took dozens of research papers and case studies and wrote The XX Edge (recently featured in Forbes).

The Business Case Grows: The research continues to grow with a 2021 Vanguard study of 2,600 US active equity funds finding mixed-gender teams outperform the benchmark by 47 basis points per year, and a 2023 WTW analysis that found investment teams in the top quartile of gender diversity outperform those in the bottom quartile by 45 basis points per year.

Additionally, a 2018 Harvard Business Review study of thousands of VC teams found that teams with more homogeneous ethnicities had lower success rates (26.4% compared to 32.2%). The WTW’s 2020 analysis also looked at 400 products across a number of asset classes over several years, including benchmark- relative returns and found “investment teams with diversity, in particular ethnic diversity, tend to generate excess returns.”

Progress Not Fast Enough: Despite the business case to bring more diversity to investment tables, women and people of color have largely been excluded from these decision-making circles.

Women attend business school at rates similar to men, join financial services firms in entry-level positions at rates higher than men, most companies have DEI plans. And yet, women comprise just 14% of fund managers globally— a number that hasn’t changed in 20 years. People of color comprise just 22% of investment industry workforce, despite being 43% of the US population. Only 1.4% of US-based assets are managed by diverse-owned firms.

Missing Measurement: The Diverse Investing Collective believes what gets measured gets done, and has set the goal of having 33% of assets managed by gender-diverse and racially-diverse portfolio management teams by 2033. Progress has been made measuring the number of women and people of color in the investment industry— but the true measure of power is the portion of assets under management controlled by gender-diverse and racially-diverse teams. This is what we want to measure and increase to drive transformational change.

The Collective is Different: We are calling for not only more women and people of color at investment firms, but critically, for them to manage more money, which we see as a true measure of change. 

Who Supports Us

Staff

• Robyn Russell, Senior Director, RobynRussell@tarahealthfoundation.org

• Ivy Jack, Senior Advisor, IvyJack@tarahealthfoundation.org

• Lisa Witter, Senior Advisor

• Laura Mesrobian, Executive Assistant, LauraMesrobian@tarahealthfoundation.org

• Betsy Kim, Manager, BestyKim@tarahealthfoundation.org

• Adewale Oduye, Consultant, Edewaleoduye@tarahealthfoundation.org

Advisory Board

• Anna Snider, Head of Due Diligence, Global Wealth and Investment Management CIO Office, BofA

• David Allen, CFA, Managing Partner, Octane Investments

• Karen Sunderam, Investment Strategist, ImpactAssets

• Matt Patsky, CEO, Trillium

• Julia Enyart Fish, Vice President, Sustainable and Impact Investing, Glenmede Trust

• Elaina Spilove, Institutional Consultant, UBS

• Michael Cosack, Principal, ImpactWise

• Shoko Sekiguchi, Senior VP, Sustainable Investing Third-Party Specialist, Citi Global

• Alexandra Yudkoff, Investment Officer, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

• Maria Lettini, CEO, US SIF

• Josh Zinner, CEO, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility

Anchor Funding Partners

• The Tara Health Foundation

• Kate Nevin, President and Portfolio Manager at TSWII

• Anonymous donor