Impact Shares Launches Women's Empowerment ETF

Impact Shares, the upstart, non-profit exchange-traded funds issuer, added to its lineup Monday with the debut of the Impact Shares YWCA Women’s Empowerment ETF WOMN.

The new ETF tracks the Morningstar Women’s Empowerment Index.

What Happened

WOMN's underlying index uses “gender equality data and scoring methodology of Equileap, which represents 200 companies culled from 1200 of the largest U.S.-listed publicly traded companies based on each company’s Gender Equality Score, which is evaluated under a set of 19 gender equality criteria,” according to Impact Shares.

The first ETF from Impact Shares was the Impact Shares NAACP Minority Empowerment ETF NACP, which debuted last month.

Why It's Important

Some ETFs following various environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing principles are proving popular socially-conscious investors. That includes some funds aimed at gender equality.

The SPDR SSGA Gender Diversity Index ETF SHE debuted about 30 months ago and has nearly $351 million in assets under management. WOMN, the new Impact Shares ETF, appears to be a natural competitor to SHE, but WOMN uses a different methodology. Companies excluded from WOMN include firearms manufacturers, tobacco makers and gambling firms.

What's Next

Impact Shares, which is structured as a 501(c)(3) charity, partners with the Rockefeller Foundation Zero Gap Portfolio.

“The Zero Gap portfolio is focused on building new financial products and markets which can channel critical capital toward the world’s most challenging problems,” according to Impact Shares.

WOMN has an annual fee of 0.75 percent, or $75 on a $10,000 investment. The new ETF holds 200 stocks.

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