The Fearless Girl statue, installed by State Street Global Advisors to bring focus to its gender diversity campaign, is rounding out her second year on Wall Street amid a slowly but surely changing business culture. As of July, every boardroom in the S&P 500 had at least one woman in its rank, according to Forbes. The 2018–2019 NACD Public Company Governance Survey reports that more than half of directors (53%) say their organizations have board diversity goals, and most cite the enhancement of the board’s cognitive diversity as the main objective.

The importance of cognitive diversity appears to be stuck inside the boardroom at most companies. In the same survey, less than half of respondents said they’d had a conversation about diversifying their senior management team. Institutional investors seem to have picked up on this inaction, with some filing shareholder proposals.

One measure of a company’s emphasis on diveristy is whether NEO diversity goals are built into short-term incentive compensation metrics. The CompanyIQ^® compensation database indicates that for both the S&P 500 and R3000, the use of diveristy metrics is increasing.