2/4/23 - Weekend Listening from Intercontinental Exchange
Our guest this week: Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio
On Wednesday, February 1, Lindsey McKone, a professional lacrosse player for Athletes Unlimited, stood on our Bell Podium next to Tara Dziedzic, the NYSE’s Head of Listings - U.S. Sectors, to ring our Closing Bell and bring the gavel down on the day’s markets.
Lindsay was on hand, along with fellow athletes, to celebrate National Girls and Women in Sports Day. A “key player” in the movement is the Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF), founded in 1974 by Billie Jean King to advance the lives of woman and girls through sports and physical activity.
Today, the WSF is supported by many NYSE-listed companies, including Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL), Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), Michelob ULTRA (NYSE: BUD), ESPN (NYSE: DIS), AT&T (NYSE: T), and Getty Images (NYSE: GETY).
In January, a major milestone for equality in sports was marked when President Biden signed the bipartisan Cantwell-Capito Equal Pay for Team USA Act into law, requiring all athletes representing the United States in global athletic competitions receive equal compensation and benefits in their sport, regardless of gender. The new law, receiving unanimous support last year -- on the 50th Anniversary of Title IX -- from the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, applies to applies to 50 different sports’ national governing bodies, like US Soccer and USA Volleyball.
In the corporate world, there’s considerably more work to be done in the area of pay equity, an issue that sits in the “S” region of ESG issues.
“If you think about the S, it’s social, what does that even mean? It’s very undefined. It’s very mushy,” Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio told my colleague Pete Asch on this week’s episode of Inside the ICE House. “And in anything mushy, you’ve got a bunch of different people defining it,” Maria added.
Syndio is working to help bring definition to the issue. The company’s mission is to build expert-backed technology that helps companies measure, achieve, and sustain workplace equity. In September last year, Syndio partnered with the NYSE to make its workplace offerings available to NYSE-listed companies in support of their ESG efforts, providing access to it PayEQ and OppEQ platforms, along with its team of expert advisers including data scientists, technology experts, and legal professionals who specialize in workplace equity and provide ongoing best practice advice.
Hear more from Maria Colacurcio in this week’s episode of Inside the ICE House.
The view from Seattle:
Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio Builds the Technology of Pay Equity Syndio works with the NYSE and its listed companies to place true value on the “S” of ESG with technology and services that help companies measure, achieve, and sustain workplace equity. In this episode, Syndio CEO Maria Colacurcio explains how her company practices what it preaches by publicly releasing pay equity and medium pay gap reports every six months. She shares how transparency and data are key to pay equity, what employers should be considering around representation amid economic uncertainty, and the lessons from her own career journey that led to her current role.
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