The Women CEO Project is the first step of a larger project on the relationship between corporate performance and governance. Other topics will be the presence of women on the boards, capital held by the state, capital held by foreign investors, or family businesses.

Two approaches

This will be achieved using two approaches:

• The first is academic, through empirical researches, publications in financial journals verifying the existence of this relationship, seeking the influence of factors such as the development (frontiers, emerging or developed markets), culture, religion, education… of the countries in question;
• The second is financial by creating a financial portfolio strategy as measured by an index into the final objective to propose investable products as funds or structured products. The index thus constructed will be somehow a continuous measurement of the performance the data are available, we extend this research to private equities.

Social aspect

Outside the academic and financial interests of the Women CEO Project, this project also has significant social aspects:

• Motivate and embolden women to contribute to society and the economy, inspire women managers/leaders and young businesswomen;
• Promote the empowerment of women and public awareness of women’s roles, especially in economic leadership, offer further evidence for policymakers to devise more women empower policies.

Partners

These two approaches are carried out in parallel, and progressively in the different geographical areas with partners and supports:

• Information providers as Stoxplus and newspapers as the Saigon Times in Vietnam;
• Vietnamese (University of Economics and Law, VCREME) and foreign (ICN, SKEMA and Paris Dauphine, France) researchers, research centers, business schools, and universities;
• Women Corporate Directors (WCD);
• Especially, Mrs Ton Nu Thi Ninh (Tri Viet Center for Social and Education Studies), Former Ambassador of Vietnam to the EU and Belgium.

Vietnam Women CEO Indexes have been launched in 2013 succesfully. They are the second indexes, besides S&P 500, in the world:

• VNX Women CEO index serves as benchmark and covers all eligible companies;
• VNX Top 10 Women CEO and VNX Top 25 Women CEO Indexes are Tradable with the largest capitalisation, liquid stocks. These indexes are specially designed to decrease the fund management costs as possible.

Other locations Vietnam is where we took our first step of a broader scheme with the great successful launch of the Vietnam Women CEO Indexes Series in early 2013  and then presented to World Bank Forum in Hanoi in 2013.

We have created Regional Women CEO Indexes for Southeast Asian in preparations for the Annual Conference organized by Women Corporate Directors in Singapore in September 2014 and our next step is to create such for Asian Nations. We and our partners are now making researches and indexes for Eurozone and European Markets that will be launched in the near future. We are also willing to support and foster empirical researches in Vietnam by implementation of Vietnam Virtual Derivatives Market Initiatives(www.vndmi.com), an academic cooperative project, that centralises in a single point of – access to different sources and types of data and documentation useful for research in Finance.