DISCUSSION Interview with Erika Karp

Interview with Erika Karp in Inside Invester Relations:

When Erika Karp talks about diversity, the line between her personal values and professional persona doesn’t just blur, it disappears.

‘I am who I am,’ she professes. ‘I happen to be a woman. I happen to be over 40. I happen to be gay.’

She also happens to be a managing director and head of global sector research at UBS, in charge of around three dozen of the investment bank’s most senior analysts and the firm’s global investment review committee.

With a wife and three young daughters, Karp is one of the financial world’s most prominent and successful lesbians, an embodiment of the power of diversity that she speaks and writes about extensively.

Since joining UBS in 1999, Karp has helped found the UBS executive diversity council (which has since been dissolved), and UBS Pride, the bank’s gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employee network.

She is also a senior adviser to the firm’s All Bar None women’s group and serves as the investment bank’s environmental and human rights representative to UBS’ group executive board.

Diversity, Karp points out, is ‘painful but profitable’, frankly admitting that her own personal experience has greatly informed her efforts to bring corporate sustainability from the fringes to the mainstream of UBS’ research.

Read the full interview here.