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By Michael Leibel
July 9 (Reuters) - Investors who want to put money behindthe idea that female leadership helps companies excel will havea new way to invest on Thursday when Barclays Bank PLC launches the Barclays Women in Leadership Total Return Index andexchange-traded notes.
The new index will be composed of companies with a femalechief executive officer or women making up at least one-fourthof the board of directors, Barclays said on Wednesday ina statement.
In addition to these requirements, companies will have tomeet specific market capitalization and trading volumethresholds to be included, the London-based bank said.
The Barclays ETNs will track the index and trade under theticker symbol "WIL" on the NYSE Arca Exchange. In connectionwith the launch, Barclays executives will ring the opening bellof the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
The ETNs are senior unsecured unsubordinated debt.
Barbara Byrne, vice chairman in investment banking atBarclays, said she believes the ETNs will serve as amarket-based approach to produce change.
"Women are significantly underrepresented in corporateexecutive leadership, yet a growing body of third-party researchsuggests that gender-diverse leadership may correlate withrelatively stronger corporate performance, as compared tocompanies with less gender-diverse leadership," Byrne said in aBarclays statement.
The Barclays index and ETNs are the latest in a line ofsimilar "bets on women" products in personal finance. In thepast year, Sallie Krawcheck, the former president of globalwealth and investment management at Bank of America, has put herhigh-profile imprimatur on two more.
Krawcheck has talked about her investments in the "No GlassCeilings" thematic index, which tracks around two dozencompanies run by women. In June, she launched the Pax EllevateGlobal Women's Index Fund - co-branded with theEllevate professional women's network, formerly known as 85Broads, a name that was a play on the location of Goldman Sachs'former New York headquarters. She bought the women'sprofessional network in 2013.
The Pax Ellevate fund owns the stocks of companies,including Avon Products Inc and Procter & Gamble Co, that are viewed as "advancing women's leadership." Thatquality is measured by a proprietary analytical tool that takesinto account the proportion of women on the board of directors,in executive management and in C-level roles, among othermetrics.
Dave Nadig, chief investment officer of ETF.com, whichprovides research and analysis of exchange-traded funds, saidthat values-based funds can be hard to sell to investors.
"People usually don't think the same way about their valueswhen making investment decisions," Nadig said. "They don't putthat filter on when thinking about their portfolios." (Reporting by Michael Leibel; Additional reporting by AshleyLau and Anna Sussman; Editing by Jan Paschal)
