DON’T HAVE A COW
Female-empower idea that company eyed before 'Girl'
Here’s an idea that’s udderly ridiculous.
Wall Street’s new Fearless Girl statue came thisclose to being a cow statue instead — until the company behind the girl-power publicity stunt realized at the last second that women would probably not appreciate being compared to a big bronze heifer.
While planning last year to promote its women’s leadership initiative, State Street Global Advisors got the bright idea to place a lifesized metal cow opposite the Financial District’s “Charging Bull,” as a feminine contrast to the testosterone-fueled male animal image.
But just three months before the cow was to be made, it dawned on State Street that casting the women of business in the symbolic role of a beefy cow might be taken as an insult, according to an email exchange between the company’s rep and City Hall obtained by The Post.
“The client realized, after we had gone down the road a bit, that a cow sculpture could be conceived as demeaning to women,” read a Dec. 6 e-mail from event consultant Stuart Weissman to Dawn Tolson, director of the NYC Street Activity Permit Office.
In an e-mail to the city several months earlier, Weissman said the “concept is to place the cow and use it as a buzz-building exercise” for the complay’s women-in-power initiative. Weissman and the city went back and forth for months on how to install the cow, until the Dec. 6, e-mail in which he said the cow idea had been nixed.
“They . . . are looking to reboot this, with the changes being that they would change the sculpture from a cow to a girl with the concept that she would be ‘staring down’ the bull.”
Boston-based State Street said it didn’t matter that they came close to a bovine p.r. disaster — because they finally put up a statue that is so popular there have been calls for it to remain permanently.
“We influenced and approved the design and placement of Fearless Girl as the best representation of the power in leadership,” it said in a statement.