Women Corporate Directors Boston
Tuesday, February 9, 5:00 – 6:30PM
Cutting Through the Fog of ESG: What Should Your Company Be Reporting to Investors?
Directors today understand the importance of ESG to investors, employees, and customers. Leading-edge companies have issued corporate social responsibility reports for years. Others are just starting their journey towards articulating their corporate vision of ESG. What does ESG mean for your company and who is doing the work to define, measure, and report it? What is the board’s role in setting strategic goals for ESG and which committees will specifically be accountable for monitoring the progress towards those goals? What metrics should be incorporated into SEC financial reports and what should be disclosed elsewhere? And why?
There have been many programs about the need for ESG, but this will be a working session around the practicalities of the role of the board, its oversight of ESG, and public disclosure of metrics. Join us for a discussion by two members of the Boston Chapter of Women Corporate Directors, Tracy Atkinson and D’Anne Hurd. Tracy is a director of Raytheon Technologies, US Steel, and Affiliated Managers Group. D’Anne is an independent trustee of Pax World Funds and Pax Ellevate Funds, a leading sustainable investment mutual fund family integrating ESG measures, EILEEN FISHER, Peckham Industries, and Martin Engineering. After D’Anne and Tracy have given us an overview of what their companies are doing on ESG, we will break into small groups to discuss other WCD Boston members’ experiences, and then reconvene to compare notes on our conversations.
We hope you can join us for what promises to be a lively discussion on a compelling topic. Detailed speaker bios are below. Please register in advance at the link below after which time you will receive a confirmation email with details about the meeting.
Pam Lenehan, Linda Whitlock, Elaine Eisenman, and Allison Downey
Registration Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIucOqgrTkrGtT9Fn_mw8HrFNjLbV92kEks
Speaker Biographies:
Tracy Atkinson is a member of the Boards of Directors of Raytheon Technologies (NYSE: RTX),
US Steel (NYSE: X) and Affiliated Managers Group (NYSE: AMG). To each of these boards, Tracy brings deep financial management expertise, a sophisticated understanding of enterprise risk and hands on experience navigating regulatory change in a public company context.
In 2014, Tracy joined the board of Raytheon Company where she chaired the Audit Committee. Upon the closing of the merger between Raytheon Company and United Technologies Corporation in April 2020, Tracy was appointed to the Raytheon Technologies board, where she currently chairs the Compensation Committee. In July 2020, Tracy was appointed to the Board of Directors of US Steel, where she is a member of the Audit and Compensation Committees, and also joined the Board of Directors of AMG.
From 2008 until her retirement in early 2020, Tracy was an Executive Vice President at State Street Corporation. She held a number of senior finance and risk management positions and was a member of the Management Committee, State Street’s most senior strategy and policy-making group. Tracy started her career at PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she was a Partner in the audit and advisory practice before joining MFS Investment Management as Chief Risk and New Product Development Officer and later CFO and Treasurer of MFS’ fund complex.
Tracy earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts. She is a Certified Public Accountant, National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) Board Leadership Fellow, member of the NACD Advisory Councils on Risk and Audit Committee Chairs, and the Women Corporate Directors Boston chapter.
D’Anne Hurd is an SEC qualified financial expert and sustainability/ESG (environmental, social responsibility and governance) authority, who brings to her board assignments hands-on experience as a senior financial management executive at GTE and PepsiCo, Inc. in addition to serving as CFO and General Counsel for six rapidly-growing, Boston-based technology companies. She has served on the boards of four public companies—including as Lead Independent Director—and eight private company boards across retail, medical devices, cloud-based SaaS, technology, pharma/biotech, financial services, telecommunications, and manufacturing industries. She has chaired each of the Audit, Compensation and Nominating and Governance Committees as well as special committees on CEO Succession/Search, on Strategy and on Technology.
Among her public company board positions, D’Anne has served since 2015 as an independent trustee for PAX World Funds/PAX Ellevate Fund (MYTF: PXWEX), the first mutual fund to invest solely in companies committed to a sustainable future (since 1971) and now a leading impact investment mutual fund family integrating ESG measures. For the Pax World Funds she serves on the Audit Committee and the Nominating and Governance Committee.
Recently D’Anne joined the board of Martin Engineering, Inc., a global manufacturer of durable products that help corporate customers handle bulk materials efficiently, safely, and profitably. She is chair of Martin’s Audit Committee and is helping this growing family business move to the next generation of products, in terms of strategy and innovation. For EILEEN FISHER, Inc., in 2018, after consulting to the company and its founder on how to structure and form a board of directors, she was invited to join the board as its first independent director. The company is a 40% ESOP-owned, Certified B Corp, which manufactures and sells luxury women’s clothing sourced and manufactured under stringent sustainability guidelines. The company’s founder, Eileen Fisher, is a pioneer in circular fashion, believing in many “lives” of her clothes. Now serving as Lead Independent Director, Chair of the Governance and Nominating Committee and Interim Chair of the Audit Committee, she guides the board in helping the company weather COVID, preserve its powerful and unique brand and emerge as a strong digital but values-driven retailer. From 2013 to 2020, D’Anne served as chair of the Audit Committee of Peckham Industries, Inc., a fourth-generation, family-owned road and bridge construction materials company. Today she continues to serve on the Peckham board as a member of the Audit Committee and member of the Nominating and Governance Committee.
D’Anne earned her JD in Corporate and Securities Law from Duke University School of Law, an MBA in Finance from the University of Connecticut, and her BA from Mount Holyoke College. She is a senior member of NACD’s Board Advisory Services practice, a regular instructor at NACD’s Director Professionalism Series, an NACD Board Leadership Fellow and a member of the Boston Chapter of Women Corporate Directors.