The iconic ‘Fearless Girl’ statue is becoming a brand

FastCompany: For years, the Charging Bull statue was the icon of Wall Street, meant to represent the financial might of a bull market. But over the past decade, it has been eclipsed by a very different sculpture. Fearless Girl , which stands on Broad Street across from the New York Stock Exchange, is a small child whose hands are planted on her hips, tilting her chin up in defiance. To the millions of people who pay homage to her every year, she embodies the power that girls have to push back against the patriarchy and bravely break into spaces where they haven’t historically been welcome, including the financial sector.

[Photo: State Street] Nearly a decade after she appeared in New York’s financial district, State Street—the financial giant that commissioned her—wants to make Fearless Girl more than just a statue. The company is launching a coordinated effort to transform her into a global brand and platform, with a new visual identity and a website where people from around the world can express what she means to them. “She’s going to have her own social media channel and other places for people to engage with her,” says Yie-Hsin Hung, president and CEO of State Street Investment Management.

[Photo: State Street] State Street commissioned the statue from the artist Kristen Visbal for International Women’s Day in 2017, standing across from Charging Bull . It was part of a marketing campaign around a State Street exchange-traded fund that allowed customers to invest in companies with a high proportion of women in senior leadership. The sculpture was meant to be temporary—installed for about a week to stare down Arturo Di Modica’s Charging Bull at the northern tip of Bowling Green. But Fearless Girl quickly became a phenomenon. Tourists lined up to photograph her. Parents posed their daughters beside her.

Di Modica objected that his own sculpture had been turned into a villain to sell a financial product, and in 2018 the city relocated Fearless Girl a few blocks north to her current position, where she now stares down the Stock Exchange instead. [Photo: State Street] The meaning of the statue has evolved as culture has changed. She was initially meant to celebrate the progress that women had made to that point in breaking the glass ceiling in corporate America. But a few years later, when the #MeToo movement swept through the country, Fearless Girl became a pilgrimage site for women confronting harassment and discrimination.

Today, she stands in a different landscape, one in which diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs are being dismantled under pressure from the Trump administration and conservative activists. “A decade ago, we were in a different moment,” Hung says. “It’s clear she has transcended that time.” State Street has not been immune from the DEI pullback. Last year, the company dropped its requirement that firms within its index funds disclose the gender, racial and ethnic composition of its boards, and ensure they all have boards with at least 30% female directors.

It was a noticeable change for a company that helped produce an icon of women’s advancement in finance. These days, State Street reframes Fearless Girl as a symbol of something larger than women’s representation. “We embrace a broader diversity,” says Hung. “When you see the people that visit her, it’s not just women and girls. It’s dads and brothers and grandfathers.

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The transformation of a well-known symbol into a brand reflects significant shifts in brand strategy and identity, making it highly impactful and relevant for professionals in the industry.