How to Build a Gender-Lens Investment Strategy

ImpactAlpha Mar 29, 2018
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

Impact Investing is a complex topic, and others found these selections from the Impact Giving archive from Giving Compass to be good resources.

  • Women give more to charity than men?

    Men, we have a problem. Well, we have a number of problems but for the purposes of this article let’s keep it simple. Our research Insights into charity fundraising released last week shows that women say that they are more likely to give to charity, give to more charities, and give more often. In fact, the results of the work carried out by YouGov, show that across the board women are more likely to take charitable activities or be engaged in causes: they’re more likely to donate, volunteer, sign a petition, buy goods from a charity shop, visit a charity’s website or show support through social networking. Charity Commission research shows that on every question related to trust and confidence, women give higher scores than men. Women also are more likely to think that charities play an essential/very important role in society than men (72 per cent to 66 per cent), and a higher percentage of women say that they have either used a charitable service or received support from a charity. There are some brilliant examples of charities working to engage and fundraise from men. Prostate Cancer UK is one such example. They have unashamedly revamped their brand over the last four years to make it more ‘masculine’ and, while not targeting men to the exclusion of women, have appealed more to a male audience. The results speak for themselves as they have seen a threefold increase in income over the last five years. Read the source article at Civil Society

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