‘Fearless Girl’ moving to NYSE area, away from ‘foe’

“FEARLESS GIRL” move.

The beloved statue will depart her perch opposite the “Charging Bull” to stare down some new scenery: the New York Stock Exchange, the Daily News has learned.

City Hall and the financial services firm that commissioned “Fearless Girl,” State Street Global Advisors, will announce the move Thursday.

“Our goal is to promote the power of having women in leadership, and placing her right next to the New York Stock Exchange is really the perfect metaphor,” Cyrus Taraporevala, president and CEO of State Street, told The News.

The move comes as the city and the company sought a more permanent home for the popular statue is on the — and one with fewer safety issues than her current spot in a Bowling Green median, which gets overrun with onlookers who often stand in the busy street.

Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen said, “What could be more important than the sort of epicenter of corporate power?” The statue first popped up just over a year ago, on International Women’s Day. The firm placed it there, officials said, to encourage more women on corporate boards — and the plucky girl, with her hands defiantly on her hips, immediately struck a chord with New Yorkers and visitors.

“It was, to be honest, really overwhelming — but overwhelming in an inspiring way,” Lynn Blake, an executive vice president at State Street, said. “The placement was really for a very specific reason and a call to action, to holding stocks in our portfolios to increasing gender diversity — because of all the research that’s been done by countless organizations that shows greater gender diversity leads to better results.”

State Street says when it began, the firm reached out to more than 700 companies in the U.S., Britain and Australia that had no women on their boards. Since then 152 have added a woman, Taraporevala said, and another 34 have pledged to do so.

But the sculpture by Kristen Visbal was not without controversy.

The bull’s sculptor, Arturo Di Modica, decried its placement, and some bashed it as “corporate feminism.”

Glen called that “noise” compared to the statue’s work in reminding people that women don’t earn equal pay, or have enough spots on boards or in legislatures.

State Street was also criticized for its own hiring — the company reached a $5 million settlement over gender pay discrimination in response to an audit brought by the federal government. Blake said the company didn’t agree with the government’s methodology or findings, but settled to avoid litigation. Taraporevala noted a third of the company’s board members are women.

Due to safety concerns about traffic — and potential terror attacks using cars — the city said it was also exploring moving the “Charging Bull.”

While “Fearless Girl” was envisioned to look right at the bull, he won’t be joining her in the plaza outside the exchange — and Taraporevala said he wasn’t worried that the art would suffer for that.

“I think ‘Fearless Girl’ stands on her own,” he said.