“These companies fully understand the benefits of having diverse teams and leadership. For example, a review by As You Sow and Whistle Stop Capital of over 1,600 companies found that manager diversity is positively associated with key financial performance indicators, including return on equity and invested capital, revenue growth, and share price performance.” Read More →

“In the organization’s Diversity Dividend report, which analyzed 1,641 US companies over a period of five years (2016 to 2022), results showed a significant correlation between diverse management teams and better financial outcomes.” Read More →

“A large-scale study released in 2023 by As You Sow, a nonprofit shareholder advocacy group promoting corporate social responsibility, revealed the direct correlation between DEI and bottom line results, ‘making a clear business and investor case for diversity as a material factor in financial success.’" Read More →

“‘Shareholders overwhelmingly voted against resolutions to end DEI and backed management maintaining merit-based diversity programs focused on financial performance,’ said Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, a nonprofit organization that advocates for environmental and social corporate responsibility." Read More →

“Over half of the nation’s 3,000 largest companies continue to build and expand DEI-related programs, according to Olivia Knight, racial and environmental justice manager at shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, which has advocated for corporate DEI programs." Read More →

“As Andy Behar, CEO of As You Sow noted: ‘Shareholders understand that diversity and inclusion are material to profitable growth. Anyone who’s looking at the data, which the companies and shareholders are, comes to the conclusion that greater diversity leads to financial outperformance.’" Read More →

“In a recent interview with Fortune, Behar explained that his group has spent months meeting with the heads of businesses caught in the crosshairs of DEI critics determined to blame everything from wildfires to plane crashes on diversity efforts. As You Sow has also proposed pro-DEI resolutions at companies like John Deere, Berkshire Hathaway, and Ford.” Read More →

“These are businesses that have existed longer than four years. We expect them to exist beyond this four-year window in front of us,” said Meredith Benton, principal founder of Whistle Stop Capital, which consults with As You Sow on DEI. “What we want to see is them making decisions that are in their business interests over the long term.”  Read More →

As You Sow submitted a shareholder proposal on behalf of Amalgamated Bank requesting information about what it described as an “ambiguous and inconsistent shift in policies and practices regarding its workplace diversity strategy.” Read More →

The proposal – led by As You Sow – called on the manufacturing firm to report on the effectiveness of its efforts to create a meritocratic workplace “where no one is excluded from contributing to the company’s success because of an immutable characteristic, such as gender, race or ethnicity”. Read More →

As You Sow writes that in July of this year Deere ‘announced an ambiguous and inconsistent shift in policies and practices regarding its workplace diversity strategy. If the company has dismantled key [DE&I] policies and practices, this exposes it to financial, competitive, legal and reputational risks.’  Read More →

The SEC’s advisers on investor issues has a duty to support shareholders who push companies to disclose risks from climate change, artificial intelligence and other matters, as businesses fight them in court, advocates said. Read More →

As You Sow, a nonprofit that promotes corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy, has drafted a shareholder proposal about John Deere’s “ambiguous and inconsistent shift in policies and practices” regarding DEI, writing that dismantling key policies exposes the company to “financial, competitive, legal, and reputational risks.”. Read More →

As You Sow, a nonprofit that represents investors interested in environmental and social issues, filed the proposal Thursday as a corporate ballot submission for votes at Deere’s next annual shareholder meeting. Read More →

Over the last two years, we’ve seen a growing number of largely white male politicians, business leaders, and even journalists calling for the end of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives at public corporations. Read More →

Danielle Fugere, president and chief counsel of As You Sow, was summoned before the committee in March along with the shareholder group’s CEO Andy Behar for 15 hours of questioning. Afterward, Fugere said Jordan’s staff couldn’t provide a legislative reason for why they needed such exhaustive information. Read More →

I stand by my assessment and believe that Friedman, were he alive today, might even agree. Nobel laureate and Columbia economics professor Joseph Stiglitz would also agree, as he explained in a recent Washington Post op-ed, “Time is up for neoliberals.” Read More →

That’s what happened to our nonprofit, when the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter asking As You Sow and 13 other mainstream investor organizations to turn over all documents related to our work representing shareholders looking to reduce climate risk in their portfolios. Read More →

It appears that the Judiciary Committee is specifically trying to discourage our coordination because they see it as the key to reducing climate risk for the entire global economy. Therefore, I propose that the 14 of us actually do work together, with total transparency, to accomplish the task that the committee has laid before us.  Read More →

Last week, Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, appeared in front of the House Judiciary Committee, where he defended responsible investing after the House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the pro-corporate responsibility group. After the hearing, Behar appeared on Democracy Now where he made the case for responsible investing and why the committee members were wrong. Read More →

Republicans are on a “crusade” against responsible investing, says Andrew Behar, CEO of the nonprofit group As You Sow that promotes corporate responsibility through shareholder advocacy. His group was subpoenaed to testify before the House Judiciary Committee this week as Republicans probe whether investments that take into account environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns violate antitrust laws. Read More →

Energy, materials and real estate firms are not reaping the “diversity dividend” which links multiracial management to better profitability, a new study of companies across eight industry sectors from shareholder activist group As You Sow shows. Read More →

Olivia Knight, As You Sow’s racial-justice initiative manager, says the next year will be pivotal in seeing whether companies continue to shrink away from their DEI pledges—what some have dubbed “diversity ditching”—or whether the trend has peaked. “We’ll know more about who is staying true to their promises and who is throwing them out the window,” she says. Read More →

The proposal, filed by shareholder advocacy group As You Sow in November, requests that Eli Lilly report to shareholders on the efficacy of its DEI efforts, providing metrics on hiring, retention and promotion of employees, including gender, race and ethnicity data. Read More →

The DEI proposal was from liberal shareholder advocate As You Sow, while the abortion resolution came from the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative investor. Both are frequent filers of environmental, social and governance proposals.

Companies must file an annual EEO-1 form with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but are not required to make this information public. Doing so helps investors and other stakeholders evaluate corporate diversity initiatives. According to an As You Sow report, from August 2020 to October 2022, the number of S&P 100 companies publicly releasing their EEO-1 forms more than quadrupled. Read More →

A new analysis of data from nearly 300 companies has found more evidence of a positive link between diverse workforces and management and the financial performance of companies. A report published Thursday by As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy group that has long pushed companies to release information about their workplace demographics, includes findings based on 277 companies’ workforce data compared against more than a dozen financial metrics. Read More →

At least 94 firms on the S&P 100 have released or promised to share the figures about the demographics of their workforces that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission collects each year, which is a huge jump from the 23 that did so two years earlier, according to a report this month by nonprofit shareholder advocacy organization As You Sow. In the past two years, the largest companies have bulked up public disclosure of data about the gender, race and ethnicity of their workforces by 300% or more in several categories. Read More →

Andrew Behar, CEO of US-based shareholder advocacy NGO As You Sow, says platforms like Meta are operating under “an authoritarian regime”.

“We’ve been filing social-focused resolutions at Meta for six years, but change doesn’t happen if [Zuckerberg] and his board don’t agree,” he says. “Although it’s technically a public company, it operates like a private one, with one man at the helm.” Read More →

Shareholder advocacy non-profit As You Sow has published the results of its corporate engagements on racial justice and workplace equity over the last 12 months, noting that 88% of the shareholder resolutions it filed against US companies this AGM season led to “improved practices”.. Read More →