Pink Chip, as a product and an initiative, has data at its core. Its premise is based upon countless studies that both highlight the success of female leaders and outline the many biases that hold them back. The development of Pink Chip required the creation of entirely new data-sets that had never previously been available to the public, while its on-going existence relies upon a range of live data streams that are updated on a daily basis. As a whole, Pink Chip uses its data to change consumer behaviour and challenge biases in the investment world.

This work is rooted in the global movement towards gender equality and diversity in the workplace. While there have been strides towards gender parity in recent decades, a pervasive bias against women in leadership positions hasn’t gone away. This bias can manifest in all sorts of insidious ways, such as investors being more likely to sell their shares in a company once a woman is appointed as its leader, regardless of her qualifications or track record - placing female leaders at a disadvantage before their tenure has even started. Pink Chip is on a mission to reverse that bias and, though it is designed to make a difference across the globe, its first iteration was built using American businesses. The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly, although DEGIRO is a European company, its user base takes a greater interest in the American market than any other - helping to get the project off the ground with as great an impact as possible. Secondly, America is home to the world’s largest financial markets, the NYSE and the NASDAQ. By focusing on businesses that were listed in the nation home to these financial powerhouses, the project could be sure to have more eyes on its launch than if it had been focused on businesses in any other market. The bias that Pink Chip is devoted to fighting, however, is found in every corner of the planet and so the project is already focused on expanding into other major markets around the world.

DEGIRO, Europe’s largest investment app, believes that investing isn’t just about money, it can make a better world. Through its platform, it highlights ESG scores so investors can make informed decisions and it releases educational content to help women get their start on the investment ladder. However, 4 in 5 investors are men and research shows that they are biased against female leaders even though female leaders tend to offer better returns. Today, just 7% of global CEOs are women. This isn’t just bad for society, it’s a poor investment strategy. DEGIRO recognised that their own platform had the ability to reverse this bias and, in doing so, boost their users’ returns while supporting women in business. While data blindspots and male investor reticence to change long-standing habits may have been stubborn obstacles to overcome, the potential to make a real difference made them hurdles worth clearing.

Pink Chip is a first-of-its-kind live index designed to make the success of female leadership impossible for investors to ignore by reframing a moral failure as a financial one. The index, initially for the US market, tracks the performance of female-led businesses and measures it against industry benchmarks and direct male competitors. For the first time, investors can see for themselves how investing in women is better for their bottom line and, through DEGIRO’s platform, choose to buy shares in women-led companies that caught their attention. The initiative, however, isn’t just for the benefit of investors. By promoting the power of female leadership, it contributes to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 5.5: Ensure women’s equal opportunities for leadership in political, economic and public life - because of this, UN Women NL joined as a launch partner to offer guidance during development and amplify Pink Chip’s message.

Pink Chip used AI and name recognition software to trawl through an extensive data-set of corporate structure filings and create a list of public companies with female leaders, a list that didn’t exist before. (please note that when we speak of “Female”, we are inclusive of all female-identifying people). This, however, was not the only criteria. Pink Chip companies must have a market capitalisation of over $2bn, a choice designed to constrain the universe of the index, and have demonstrated revenue growth of at least 8% over the last three years. This last criteria was chosen to insulate Pink Chip from the glass cliff effect, a phenomenon whereby women are more likely than men to be appointed to positions of leadership in companies experiencing consistently bad performance, where they are more likely to be “caretaker CEOs” than men.

To create the index, DEGIRO enlisted Thematic, ​​an AI-powered investment research platform. Thematic collects the back-end data on which Pink Chip is built and refreshes the list of companies behind the index on a daily basis. The index lives primarily on pinkchip.org, where its performance, the companies featured, and the methodology used to create it are all freely available for anyone to access. Pink Chip is also available on the DEGIRO app where investors can compare its success to other indices and choose to invest in women-led businesses. Besides investors, Pink Chip has also been championed by academics who, for the first time, have an open data-set of female-led companies that can be used across their research. With a view to the future, conversations are currently underway with other investment platforms that wish to host Pink Chip while new indices are in development for the EU, UK, and beyond.

Pinkchip.org attracted 70,000 visitors within its first week. Within three weeks, over 14,500 DEGIRO users invested in Pink Chip companies. In that time, those companies saw a 6.7% stock price increase while the index climbed 9.48%. Overall, Pink Chip has outperformed market benchmarks by over 80% and continues to climb. With UN Women NL and grassroots activists on-board, Pink Chip made over 58m online impressions, reached over 85m people and its ticker has been added to Bloomberg. An advisory board has also been set up featuring leading figures across 5 different countries. Its job is to ensure Pink Chip can evolve in an independent way that maximises the impact it can make. On top of all this, with its data included in a variety of academic studies, Pink Chip can impact the perception of female leaders far beyond the business world.