How to Create a Pipeline For More Women Business Leaders

Gender Lens Investing: Why the Opportunities Are Growing

Giving Compass' Take: • Suzanne Biegel, a gender lens investing pioneer at Wharton's Social Impact Initiative, discusses the recent trends of gender lens investing and the opportunities for growth.  • What are successful examples of gender lens investing, and how is it changing the impact investing world?  • Read about how to build a gender lens investment strategy.  Gender lens investing — using capital to alleviate the economic plight of women and girls — is gaining steam. From being a blip on the screen a mere two decades ago, this field is being embraced by more than 100 private and public funds. And their investment products are getting more targeted: Investors can put money in funds that aim to improve women’s access to health care, for example. Gender lens investing can be defined in a few different ways. One is to think about how you integrate gender analysis into financial analysis to get to a better outcome in any investment. Another way is to think about how we use capital intentionally to achieve positive impacts on women and girls. You might think about women’s access to capital. You might think about products and services that positively affect women and girls or take advantage of the women’s market. You might think about where women show up across the value chain of a business, in governance, in leadership, in supply chains and distribution channels all the way through to end customers. And you might be thinking about how we use our capital intentionally to shift structural gender inequality. When I started doing this kind of investing 17 years ago, it was hard to find other people who were ready to be in this conversation. There were people coming from an international development perspective who were asking, ‘How do we get capital to women entrepreneurs?’