RESEARCH PARTNERSHIP WITH STANFORD SPARQ
Through a partnership with Stanford SPARQ, Illumen Capital combines research with significant investment knowledge. Illumen Capital works with a group of the world’s leading social psychologists on understanding implicit bias, and in turn engages our fund managers to install strategies and tools designed to reduce racial and gender bias.
The partnership’s aim is to apply research to understand where bias is most prevalent in the asset allocation process. We then use these data-driven insights to help our fund managers address these blindspots and invest in underestimated women and people of color.
Illumen Capital sees our impact in terms of systems change. That’s why we’ve created a research partnership to provide insights to our managers seeking to enable them with the best tools to make more informed and more optimal decisions.
BIAS IN INVESTING
Illumen Capital's research, curriculum and coaching help investors become aware of their own implicit biases so they can make better investment decisions and generate more impact and financial value in the process.
THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Race influences professional investors’ financial judgments co-authored by Illumen Capital and Stanford SPARQ: peer reviewed and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The study examined differences in judgment when all details about a fund’s track record and qualifications were kept constant except race.The results suggest first that underrepresentation of Black managers in the realm of investing is not only a pipeline problem, and second, that funds led by Black men might paradoxically face the most barriers to advancement after they have established themselves as strong performers.
IMPACT
Illumen Capital employs an impact management and measurement framework designed to understand the qualitative and quantitative progress our fund managers make in areas of diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as other forms of positive impact in our world.
