In brief: LPs use the ‘team page’ gauge for DE&I, GP reports

Minorities may not look like minorities on a fund manager's website, an IR head says.

Potential LPs “look at our website and tell us there are no diverse or Hispanic people at our firm”, a GP’s investor relations head said at PEI Group’s Investor Relations, Marketing & Communications conference last week. “Well, we have people who identify as Hispanic but they don’t look Hispanic, or their names don’t sound like Hispanic names,” he added.

Neuberger Berman also uses corporate websites as a rough measure of a firm’s diversity credentials. “[If] all of the investment team managers are male and white, that’s a problem. You really feel like these folks might be dinosaurs,” Patricia Miller Zollar, managing director and head of the investment consultancy’s private equity emerging managers strategy, said last year.

New Private Markets has previously questioned how useful this method is. The quest for a diverse and more equitable economy has its quandaries.