How to Build a Gender-Lens Investment Strategy

ImpactAlpha Mar 29, 2018
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How to Build a Gender-Lens Investment Strategy Giving Compass

Giving Compass’ Take:

• There are social and financial motivations driving gender-lens investing. Creating clear goals, strategies, and metrics are key to succeeding in lifting women up.

• What are your priorities when it comes to investing? How can you align your existing goals, systems, and metrics to incorporate gender-lens investing? 

• Learn why gender-lens investing is financially smart. 

Gender lens investing considers investments’ social impact on women alongside financial returns. In the past several years, there has been tremendous growth in impact funds, exchange-traded funds, and mutual funds focused on gender-lens investing. Recent studies have indicated over $2 billion of assets focused on gender-lens investing.

There are opportunities to apply a gender lens at four key inflection points: when defining the mandate for gender-lens investing, developing a strategy, due diligence, and when providing operational assistance to portfolio companies.

  1. Define the mandate: The gender-lens investing movement began with a strong focus on women-led businesses. Investors applying a gender lens can support gender-equitable workplaces, companies that produce products and services that serve women and companies that work on structural issues such as reshaping rigid gender norms and addressing violence.
  2. Develop your strategy: Drivers could include gender-blind processes for recruitment and promotion, good parental leave policies, and equal pay — and will certainly vary by industry and geography.
  3. Incorporate Metrics into Due Diligence: Once these critical factors have been identified, investors can incorporate corresponding metrics into due diligence. Equal pay, for example, can be clearly measured through historical data for specific roles.
  4. Support investees’ progress: Finally, investors can advise investees or portfolio companies on how to be more gender equitable and provide them with advice and support on strengthening their business models.

Read the full article on gender-lens investing by Rachna Saxena at ImpactAlpha

If you are looking for more articles and resources for Impact Investing, take a look at these Giving Compass selections related to impact giving and Impact Investing.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
    Click here for more.
    Women’s Leadership Drives Long-term Sustainable Growth

    If you’re looking to tap the next big global growth markets, you’d better be a woman, or at least be sitting next to one. Last year, the Business and Sustainable Development Commission outlined the $12 trillion "economic prize" in delivering on the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty, boost social well-being and fight climate change. Now the group is putting a stake in the role of women’s leadership in delivering  —  and capturing the gains from  —  the global goals. “Women are bringing something different to … companies,” Cecily Joseph, a vice president at Symantec, the security software company, told the Business Commission’s researchers. “They are using the global goals as a tool to think about innovation differently, to bring new ideas to the table to help a company.” To win in the global growth markets of the next 15 years, business leaders need to think long-term, innovate around complex social issues, and collaborate across markets and sectors, according to “Better Leadership, Better World,” the commission’s new report. Short-term profit maximizing, corporate secrecy and environmental negligence isn’t going to cut it in the long-term game of global development and sustainability. Success in the global arena now takes new levels of corporate openness, action to mitigate climate and environmental risks and a culture of inclusiveness….That is, the core competencies of women in business. Women occupy just 15% of board seats worldwide, and in the U.S., represent just 5% of CEOs among companies in the S&P 500. The report cites research that shows women excel at deploying the competencies necessary to tap the economic opportunity represented by the Sustainable Development Goals. Boosting the number of women on managerial teams, for example, has been shown to boost a firm’s ability to innovative, especially around spotting new technologies, business models, products, and services for solving complex societal problems. Read the full article about women leadership driving long-term sustainable growth by Dennis Price at ImpactAlpha.

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