If you invest in mutual funds, in addition to or as an alternative to investing directly in individual companies, you are faced with a different set of circumstances and options for action.

There are two ways in which you can encourage mutual fund directors to serve as your surrogates in bringing about change in the leadership of the companies in which the mutual funds are invested. Both require some additional research on your part.

1. You can identify from the mutual fund's annual report the ten companies in which the fund has invested particularly large amounts of money. The annual report identifies the top ten holdings of each fund. You can then research the composition of the boards and executive suites of those companies by looking at the company's website or obtaining its proxy statement online from the SEC. Armed with your findings about those companies that lack enough women in leadership positions, you can bring those facts to the attention of the mutual fund directors and ask them to exercise their proxies in the same way that you would were you a direct shareholder of the companies.
2. You can read the proxy voting guidelines that the directors have adopted. The fund's annual report and proxy statement tells you how and where to find them. In most cases, except if your fund is managed by a socially responsible investment firm, the guidelines followed by the managers of your mutual funds will indicate that they will vote with management on uncontested board elections. However, you can urge the trustees to amend their proxy voting guidelines to reflect a more activist approach to board composition.

Proxy votes, letters and attending the annual meeting are options for mutual fund investors as well. However, the focus of these actions is on the composition of the mutual fund board and not the leadership of the companies in which the mutual funds are invested.

As in the case of publicly held corporations, mutual funds issue annual (and often semi-annual) reports that identify the members of their boards of directors. Some mutual funds also give you the right to vote for nominees as directors of those funds and issue proxy statements that contain the same kinds of information about the directors as do company proxy statements. Similarly, those proxy statements include information about how to contact the non-management directors and about the annual meeting of the fund. Whether or not you have the right to vote for mutual fund directors, you can contact the non-management directors.

Comparable information about fund directors and how to contact non-management directors is provided in the annual reports of mutual funds that do not offer you the opportunity to vote on director nominations. In this situation, letters are the only effective way to express your opinion.