Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which manages Norway’s NOK14trn (€1.2trn) sovereign wealth fund, has increased the gender diversity of its leader group – and the team’s size – with a new appointment.

Malin Norberg has been appointed as the new co-chief investment officer asset strategies, NBIM announced yesterday afternoon, doubling up with the current chief of asset strategies Geir Øivind Nygård.

NBIM said it had been decided to establish the new role “due to the continued growth of asset strategies and the importance of the area”.

Norberg is currently global head of fixed income trading, a position she held since 2021. She will start the role on 1 April and be part of NBIM’s leader group.

Chief executive officer Nicolai Tangen said he was glad that Norberg, who joined NBIM in 2009, had accepted the new role.

“Malin has a solid fixed income and trading background and experience in managing a global team. Besides, she has a strategic mindset and an empathic leadership style,” he said in the announcement.

Norberg will be jointly responsible for the fund’s portfolio management, external manager selection, security lending and trading, according to NBIM.

The addition of Norberg to Tangen’s top team increases that group to 10 people, and also intensifies its female representation once more.

Since Tangen joined NBIM as CEO in September 2020, the gender diversity of the leader group has steadily increased. Once Norberg has joined, 40% of the top team will be women, after the female proportion was raised around a year ago to 37.5% from 33.3% with the appointment of Birgitte Bryne as new chief technology and operating officer.

Until five years ago, NBIM’s leader group was all male.

In a previous profile article about Malin on NBIM’s website, she said all workplaces benefited from diversity in terms of gender, age, background, etc, but that recruiting women into finance remained a challenge.

“In my experience, women are just as good traders as men, but less likely to think of it as a career path because of the stereotype,” she said.

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