It is a truth universally acknowledged that a business seeking better returns must be in want of women.  (Sorry, Jane Austen) 

You see, research has shown that businesses - and particularly investment managers - perform better with a balance of men and women in the workplace. ​

Too much testosterone can wreak havoc on financial behaviour. So here’s the conundrum: why are there not more women in executive leadership roles? 

“Women and minorities manage only 1% of the asset management industry’s $71 trillion in assets and only 15% of global mutual fund managers are women” says  Girls Who Invest.  It’s an organization that’s done the sums and exists to change them. 

Girls Who Invest selects about a hundred female students each year after a hard-fought application process. It then puts them through three-week summer camps at Wharton and the University of Notre Dame.  The women emerge prepped and inspired for a career in finance. 

Each year, after teaching the Color Accounting module at the camps, we leave uplifted.  The bright minds of the savvy up-and-comers, from widely diverse backgrounds, give us great cause for optimism.  

Clearly, balance shouldn’t only happen on balance sheets. 

Peter

​Albert Einstein, the greatest scientific genius of his time, changed the very way we understand the universe.  

He discovered the truths that led to the equation E=MC2 and the theory of relativity by conducting visual thought experiments. Famously, he imagined riding alongside a beam of light. 

Einstein had been unhappy at school in Germany where, in the late 1800s, schooling was rigid and all about rote learning. So he moved to German-speaking Switzerland and sought out a school in Aarau which followed the principles of Johann Pestalozzi, an educational reformer.  Those principles made all the difference and set him on the path to his breakthroughs.
 
Pestalozzi’s motto was “Learning by head, hand and heart”.  He wrote that “Visual understanding is the essential and only true means of teaching how to judge things correctly.”  The learning of numbers must be subordinated to first understanding concepts, he believed.
 
On so many levels, our worldwide community of Color Accounting educators are proud to call ourselves “Pestalozzians”.  Belief in the individual. Use of hands in the learning process. The power of the visual BaSIS Framework we use.  And even the priority of words over numbers as one learns to make sense of financial statements.  
 
200 years later we are unreservedly happy to take our hats off to you, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, with a deference you wouldn’t demand from us.

Peter