Diversity - why it's important
Jun 5, 2019
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1. Is it more important for financial services firms in Asia to be more diverse?
2. What does diversity mean?
3. What are the positive consequences of embracing diversity?
4. Do opinions about diversity change around the world?
Video transcript
1. Is it more important for financial services firms in Asia to be more diverse?
I think it's essential, and there's plenty of research that would tell you that diverse teams, whether it's gender, or diverse ways of thinking, or ethnicity, collectively come up with better decisions than a collection of stale pale males who all think the same way. We've done our own research on that, alongside Credit Suisse and State Street, and I'd say that's firmly embedded in modern thinking. Whether it's executed in the same way, whether companies have managed to find a way of building diverse teams, I think that's much more questionable, but people do understand that customers will have better outcomes if they're dealing with diverse teams.
2. What does diversity mean?
Diversity for us means effectively having inputs, ideas and actions from a broad range of people who have different ways of thinking about the same subject. Diversity and inclusion means that people who have different ideas are welcome to join in within the way that an organisation runs, and that can cover everything from gender, it can cover ethnicity, it can cover sexual orientation. But the important thing is are we an organisation who is welcoming to different ideas, and can work in a way where those ideas are used collectively together to come up with better collective ideas.
3. What are the positive consequences of embracing diversity?
Most people would want to work for an organisation that is accepting of lots of different ideas and different people. For me, personally, I know I have an interest in people, I like to get different opinions about how we could tackle certain problems, and if you think about what organisations are in business to do, in most cases they're here to look after their customers. And customers will demand that they have the best minds, and the best minds are not only the ones that all went to the same school and all wear the same suit.
4. Do opinions about diversity change around the world?
If we split the world into three - the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific - actually in Asia-Pacific, although there is still more work to do, from a gender perspective there are more women working in the industry than in the other two regions. If you look at it from a CFA Institute perspective, we have more female candidates in Asia-Pacific, and in fact in China it's the only country in the world where there are more women studying for the CFA Programme than there are men.
More videos from Nick Pollard, CFA Institute
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