Take a walk through Manhattan’s Financial District and you may come face to face with a daring young girl with a bronze complexion standing in the middle of Wall Street. The Fearless Girl statue was installed in March in time for a corporate governance symposium on March 7th and International Women’s Day on March 8th by State Street Global Advisors, a $2.5 trillion asset management firm, and the captivating sculpture has gained even more popularity.
The statue of the defiant girl, created by artist Kristen Visbal, is part of State Street’s campaign to pressure companies to include more women on their executive boards. Staring down Wall Street’s iconic Charging Bull sculpture, the Fearless Girl’s powerful stance calls attention to the lack of gender diversity in boardrooms.
“We wanted to highlight the power of women in leadership,” says Boston-headquartered State Street, which has 32,000 employees in 30 countries and is celebrating the firm’s 225th anniversary today. “So we made room in the one place business couldn’t ignore.”
After drawing crowds (and some unwanted attention) to its Wall Street setting for past few months, the statue received even more airtime after sweeping a groundbreaking number of titles at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which wrapped on Saturday.
The statue, which will remain in place through February, won 18 Cannes Lions awards in total, including four Grand Prix awards in the festival’s Titanium, Outdoor, PR and Glass categories.
It's now time for the Titanium Grand Prix….and the winner is -Fearless Girl #CannesLions pic.twitter.com/qPzyT9hXKC
— Cannes Lions (@Cannes_Lions) June 24, 2017
The statue’s dominating run came as no surprise to the crowd at the festival, considering its popularity with the Cannes Lions jury and its global audience. The campaign became one of the highest-honored initiatives in the festival’s history overnight.
Diversity was Topic A at this year’s Cannes Lions gathering, from panels featuring actress Helen Mirren, Russian punk rockers Pussy Riot and supermodel Karlie Kloss to sessions with Unilever and P&G hashing out the topic of what more brands can do in conversation with the likes of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and media doyenne Tina Brown.
Yet it was the Fearless Girl campaign that “was loved globally,” said Titanium Lions juror Chloe Gottlieb of R/GA. “That’s because it is so simple and quiet in its strength but loud in the message it conveys.”
In addition to its simplicity and strength, the statue was praised by the jury for its profound timeliness and its permanence (even if not forever in that spot). “That is beyond anything we’ve ever done,” stated Titanium Lions jury president Tham Khai Meng, worldwide CCO of Ogilvy. “That is permanent.”
As for what happens after “Fearless Girl” finds a new home away from Wall Street’s bull in February, the fight for gender equality and advancement of women is an ongoing issue that the company is committed to.
As State Street CMO Hannah Grove told Interbrand CMO Andrea Sullivan in November when asked about the topic,
We’ve got a long way to go, and I feel a tremendous sense of responsibility. I think that women need to help other women. It’s the only way true progress will be made. The other thing that I would say is that you’ve got to have allies. You have to engage other people in helping you to fight your battle and, for me, that means bringing men into the equation. It has to be a partnership because gender equality benefits everybody. Our Chairman and CEO, Jay Hooley, is tremendously committed to gender equality. He has set real and measurable goals that are linked to compensation—all in an effort to ensure greater diversity at the leadership level.
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