Perspectives

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Calvert Women’s Principles (CWP), established as a partnership between Calvert Research and Management (“Calvert”) and UN Women in 2004. They remain the first global code of corporate conduct focused exclusively on advancing, protecting, and investing in women.

Engagement is a critical part of responsible investing at Calvert. In this paper, we discuss how a data-driven engagement strategy rooted in financial materiality can overcome the challenges of engagement and is more likely to support long term value creation, risk management and real world impact.

Calvert believes companies that successfully manage financially material ESG risks and opportunities are better positioned for long-term outperformance. We believe investment strategies that focus on these companies are more likely to provide opportunities for long-term value creation as well as positive global ESG outcomes.

Responsible investing encompasses a broad range of approaches, but there are a common set of requirements for investors who seek to deliver value both to clients and to society more broadly.

In the third paper of our gender diversity series, we discuss one of the top remaining global gender issues: the gap in the corporate “talent pipeline” – where gender and ethnic representation at the board and employee levels is much higher than at the executive and senior management levels.

The energy transition will be complex, but in our view it’s this complexity that creates a rich opportunity set for investors intent on making a positive global impact, in addition to pursuing solid financial returns.

This paper discusses how as corporate DEI performance improves, Calvert refines its methodology to recognize those gains and promote improvement, thus helping to identify leaders and improvers. It discusses the Calvert Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Index Series and the strategies derived from them, and notes that Calvert’s DEI indexes have each outperformed their broad market benchmark since inception as of September 2023.

In this second paper of our 2023 gender diversity series, we examine changes in the makeup of the U.S. labor force and workforce that occurred partly because of the pandemic—in particular, the effects on women workers. We also explore these trends among other developed economies and offer perspectives on how companies can recruit and retain workers in this new era.

The first in a new Calvert series on gender diversity, this paper focuses on the historical background and driving forces behind improvements in the gender composition of the U.S. workforce from the 1940s to the 2020s. It also touches on how these trends apply generally to international markets.