1. Mining and agricultural business Hancock Prospecting with Chairman Gina Rinehart is now Australia’s largest private company, overtaking paper, packaging and recycling company Visy’s 11-year reign.
2. Prominent international accounting firm Ernst & Young has declared that within its Australian branch, more women than men have been promoted internally to partner, with 55% of its 31 internal appointments being female. The firm has also made progress on its gender pay gap, confirming it’s now at less than 1% across the Australian organisation.
3. A two-year academic study in Hong Kong that investigated every local financial-planning firm in the country found financial advisers had given women riskier financial advice than men for their investments, despite having similar risk profiles. “Advisers think they can fool women and get away with selling them advice with sub-par results,” said Utpal Bhattacharya, a co-researcher from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “This is what we call statistical discrimination,” she said.
4. Leen Kawas, the 35-year-old founder and CEO of Athira Pharma, a Seattle-based biotech, is the first woman to guide an initial public offering (IPO) in the state of Washington for more than 20 years.
5. The US and the European Union are in disagreement over a 3% digital levy proposed by the EU that will further tax tech giants like Apple, Alphabet and Amazon, which have been the business winners of this Covid-19 economic crisis.
