The iconic 'Fearless Girl' statue is becoming a brand

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.

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.

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.

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. It’s the same view we have at State Street, which is embracing a wide range of perspectives and backgrounds.”

But even as State Street tries to reframe Fearless Girl as no longer primarily about women—rather about “strength and resiliency and optimism,” as Hung puts it—the statue still seems to resonate most with women and girls.

Hung recalls visiting the financial district a few months ago, before trading began, when she spotted a mother with a daughter who was about 6. The child stood opposite the statue, mirroring her pose. The mother told Hung her daughter had been struggling with anxiety at school. Now, when she feels worried, the little girl pretends to be the Fearless Girl.

State Street is now giving fans of the statue a more organized way to share such stories. So far, that outpouring has been scattered across social media; the new website will centralize it. The company is also launching a merchandise collection whose proceeds will support charities devoted to empowering the next generation of leaders, along with educational field trip guides for classrooms.

The rollout begins with a public block party outside the stock exchange on July 24, kicking off a year of programming that will build toward the statue’s 10th anniversary in March 2027.

Visbal, the artist who created Fearless Girl, is absent from the celebrations. State Street sued her for breach of contract and trademark infringement after she began selling replicas of the statue; the two parties settled last year. “We’re on very good terms with the artist,” Hung says. “Our focus is less around her history, because with art there’s always that level of debate. We’re very much focused on her future.”

The world has changed a lot since Fearless Girl planted her feet on Wall Street, and not always in a way that has benefited women and girls. The ideal of gender equality is under open attack. But the girl stands unmoved, staring down an institution far bigger than she is. She suggests that the future is still unwritten, and the girls who are inspired by her now may yet write it.