Fearless Girl

On the eve of International Women’s Day in early March 2017, State Street Global Advisors, an investment management firm headquartered in Boston, installed a roughly four-foot-tall bronze statue of a young girl opposite Charging Bull on the northern tip of Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan. Designed by Delaware-based sculptor Kristen Visbal, Fearless Girl depicts a defiant young girl, roughly four-foot-tall, with her hands on her hips, shoulders back, and a confident smirk on her face. An inscription on a bronze circular plaque at her feet reads: “Know the power of women in leadership. She makes a difference.” The statue is part of the company’s ongoing campaign to persuade other companies to add more women to their boards. After the statue’s installation, State Street Global Advisors sent a letter to the thousands of companies that compose the Russell 3000 index, encouraging them to diversify their boards. 

In preparation for the statue’s installation, State Street Global Advisors obtained a seven-day permit from the City of New York. Fearless Girl, therefore, was originally meant to be a temporary art piece in Bowling Green. The sculpture, however, garnered national and global attention, and endeared itself to many New Yorkers. In response to the immense public support for the statue, the mayor’s office extended its permit. In late November 2018, city workers removed Fearless Girl from Bowling Green in preparation for her move to her new, permanent home in front of the New York Stock Exchange. In her stead, State Street Global Advisors installed a circular bronze plaque with two footprints that read: “Fearless Girl is on the move to The New York Stock Exchange. Until she’s there, stand for her.” The following month, executives of State Street Global Advisors, with the help of New York City Council members and representatives from the mayor’s office, unveiled the statue in front of the New York Stock Exchange during a public ceremony. 

State Street Global Advisors’ gender diversity initiative, in fact, has sparked change in corporate boardrooms across the country. In 2017, as the firm’s CEO Cyrus Taraporevala pointed out in a 2018 interview with NBC News, one in four of the 3,000 largest companies in the United States did not have a single woman on their boards. By the end of 2018, Taraporevala claimed, 301 of those companies added a woman to their boards and twenty-eight others have plans to do so in the near future. 

Despite strong public support for it, the statue has not been free from controversy. After the installation of Fearless Girl, Arturo Di Modica, creator of Charging Bull, criticized the sculpture, arguing that it was simply a marketing gimmick and that it unfairly vilified his work. In response, another artist sympathizing with Di Modica created a bronze sculpture of a small dog lifting its leg to urinate. In May 2017, in an act of protest, he placed his creation alongside Fearless Girl. Later that same year, a journalist for NPR reported that a U.S. Department of Labor investigation discovered that the firm that sponsored Fearless Girl, State Street Global Advisors, had underpaid both its African American and female executives. 

Amiri, Farnoush. "'Fearless Girl' statue finds permanent home at New York Stock Exchange," NBC News, December 10, 2018 <https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fearless-girl-statue-finds-permanent-home-new-york-stock-exchange-n946046>.

Kimmelman, Ruben. "Gone Girl: Lower Manhattan 'Fearless Girl' Statue Is 'On the Move,'" NPR, November 28, 2018 <https://www.npr.org/2018/11/28/671546407/gone-girl-lower-manhattan-fearless-girl-statue-is-on-the-move>.

McLean, Bethany. "The Backstory Behind Wall Street's 'Fearless Girl' Statue on Wall Street," The Atlantic, March 13, 2017 <https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/03/fearless-girl-wall-street/519393/>.