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My view on governance is that it should

always be a critical part of your investment process.

And I still feel that the market at large doesn't take it as

seriously as it should.

It actually took a passive house spider to get us

to a place where every company in the s and p 500 has a woman

on the board. And that happened as late as 2021.

And I think that shows how underappreciated governance is

and what a way there is to go going forward. In my portfolio,

which is supposedly a positive progressive portfolio,

still only 26% of companies in the portfolio have a women on the board.

Still less than 80% of companies have an independent

director on the board.

And I think that shows you that investor culture still has a long way

to go here. There has been progress,

even in areas like Japan.

There's been significant progress around considering

shareholders and all of the wider stakeholders as well.

There is movement, even thinking about local people's rights,

indigenous people's rights.

We've seen companies go to court now over these issues.

So they've got to think about governance very seriously and it really starts in

the boardroom, but it's,

it's not reached the standards we would like it to reach.

Yet there are many examples of investors

collaborating together to create change in the boardroom using

their voting and stewardship policies. These things can be very powerful.

For example, uh, limiting the remuneration of the board,

separating out the chairperson from the c e o,

making sure they're not one in the same.

There have been many wins in this area, um,

that as I think my statistics showed you, we haven't really gone far enough.

And so I think regulators, investment exchanges,

bodies like the United Nations principles of responsible investment,

they've definitely started the work, but there's more to go.