Pink Chip is built upon an insight that turned the cause of a problem into the solution itself. When closely examining the people that Pink Chip aims to help, research revealed a stunning contradiction. This contradiction became fundamental to the project and shifted focus from those in need to those that were holding them back. Pink Chip was able to reframe its cause as one that aligned with this new audience’s wants and needs. Its success is built upon this perception shift, which provides a new strategy for one of society’s oldest battles.

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 platform had the ability to reverse this bias and close the leadership gap. 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.

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 empowers its users to become the smartest investors that they can be by making sure they are fully informed - both of opportunities they should maximise and of barriers that can hold them back. This is a responsibility that DEGIRO takes seriously.

While working to close the investor knowledge gap, another gap came into view - the leadership gap. With research, it became clear that working to solve this issue would be beneficial to DEGIRO and society on multiple fronts. With a majority-male audience, DEGIRO has access to the biased investors that are causing the problem. Teaching those investors the error of their ways helps them to become better investors. Supporting female business leaders signifies to potential female investors that they have a place in the investing world. And finally, closing the leadership gap through investment proves DEGIRO’s belief that investing can make the world a better place.

Research into the “leadership gap” and a series of interviews with academics and activists in this field revealed a series of statistics that didn’t add up. Women outscored men in 17 of the 19 key leadership capabilities, firms with female CEOs produced superior stock price performances, and businesses led by female decision-makers reported above-average profits. In spite of this, Wall Street investors place a lower value on the shares of female-led companies, those businesses are 63% less likely to receive venture capital funding, and excessive negative media attention means a company’s stock price can fall by up to 3% when a female leader is announced. This led to our insight: this bias isn’t just bad for female leaders, it’s also bad for investors. By using their platform to reverse it, DEGIRO saw that they could boost their users’ returns while supporting women in business.

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.

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 keeps climbing. It is championed by academics who now have an open data-set of female-led companies to use across their research. With UN Women NL and grassroots activists on-board, Pink Chip made over 58m online impressions, reached over 85m people, and was added to Bloomberg. With an advisory board established across five countries, other investment platforms are in discussions to host Pink Chip, while new indices are in development for additional markets. Better still, with its data included in a variety of academic studies, Pink Chip can impact the perception of female leaders beyond the business world.