Great news for the gender lens investing sector — 2017 brought a massive 41% increase in public market securities that use gender lens strategies.

A report entitled Gender Lens Investing: Investment Options in the Public Markets produced by Veris Wealth Partners has the details. Suzanne Biegel, Founder of Catalyst At Large, is credited with collaborating and gathering the information used in the analysis, this being her second year working in partnership with Veris Wealth Partners to create the public market scan. The study pulls together information from over 23 gender lens investment instruments produced by a wide range of financial companies including Barclay’s, Pax Ellevate, State Street Global Investors, ThirtyNorth Investments, Morgan Stanley, and others.

Gender lens investing made a remarkable jump in 2017, going from $645 million in 2016 to $910 million in 2017. And while $910 million is an impressive amount of money to be devoted to gender lens investing, in the larger picture of asset management as a whole, the gender lens investing sector is still relatively small. In an industry that manages an estimated total of $71.4 trillion dollars as of 2015, $910 million is .00127% of that $71.4 trillion total — in other words, a drop in the bucket of total financial assets under management.

Read the full article about gender lens investing  by Kiersten Marek at Philanthropy Women