Hi, I'm Ali Jackson Jolly. I am here with Maureen O'Brien. She is the senior vice president of corporate governance with Siegel Marco Advisors. Maureen welcome.

Hi Ali, thanks for having me.

I'm excited to have you here.

I recently saw there was a survey done by your firm that talked about trends with respect

to investment in DEOI and sustainability.

And it went something like this.

In 2021 to 2022, following the year we had

in which George Floyd was murdered and the COVID pandemic, which took its toll on historically marginalized populations.

Investment firms started upping their investment in

DEI. So in 2021 and 2022 those investments increased, but last year a lot of those gains were lost at the same time

Investment in sustainability has continued to increase. Can you tell me about that study and what you think it's important for us to know?

Yeah, thanks for asking. So we do this study every year and we don't look at what companies are saying about

DEI but rather we ask for the actual data on the demographics and so we take all of that data

and we look at what the summary results are.

And what we showed for 2023

is that as a population of the workforce women had fewer roles and fewer roles in the

C-suite and we saw the same trend particularly with black employees.

There was a 50% drop in the representation of black employees in the C-suite in particular,

and then a 4% drop in the workforce overall.

So it looked like a lot of the gains that we saw,

to your point, in the aftermath of George Floyd

and the Black Lives Matter movement, A lot of those gains that we saw

...