Sustainable Fund Proxy Votes Show a Range of Support for ESG Measures

Jackie Cook is Director, Stewardship, Product Strategy & Development in Sustainalytics’ Stewardship services team. Up to October 2021, she was director of stewardship research for Morningstar Research Services LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Morningstar, Inc. In her present role, she leads the ESG Voting Policy Overlay offering, which offers clients a specialist ESG voting lens.

Cook joined Morningstar in October 2018 with Morningstar’s acquisition of Fund Votes Research Ltd., a company that she founded in 2007. Fund Votes had been a provider of mutual fund and exchange-traded fund proxy-voting data on corporate resolutions and shareholder proposals across ESG topics. Previously, Cook had been a senior research associate at The Corporate Library (which merged with GMI in 2010 and was acquired by MSCI in 2014) and a junior research fellow at the Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge. Over the past 22 years, she has also worked as a consultant on governance research projects for UNCTAD and several nongovernment organizations and has published academic articles on mutual corporate form, investor advocacy, and energy governance.

Cook holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in clinical psychology from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, South Africa, and a master’s degree in research psychology from Rhodes University, South Africa. She also holds a bachelor’s degree with honors in economics and management from Saïd Business School of the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

Jon Hale, Ph.D., CFA, was head of sustainability research for Morningstar. He directs the company’s research initiatives on sustainable investing, beginning with the launch of the Morningstar Sustainability Rating™ for funds in 2016.

Before assuming this role in 2016, Hale was director of manager research, North America, for Morningstar, where he led approximately 60 manager research analysts based in North America and oversaw the team’s operations, thought leadership, and manager research coverage across asset classes.

Hale first joined Morningstar in 1995 as a mutual fund analyst and helped launch the institutional investment consulting business for Morningstar in 1998. He left the company in 1999 to work for Domini Social Investments, LLC before rejoining Morningstar as a senior investment consultant in 2001. He became managing consultant in 2009 and head of the Investment Advisory unit in 2014.

Hale holds a bachelor’s degree, with honors, from the University of Oklahoma and a doctorate in political science from Indiana University.