Gender Lens Investing: Bending the Arc of Finance for Women & Girls

Veris’ fifth annual survey of gender lens investing in the public markets, led by Luisamaria Ruiz Carlile and Alison Pyott.

The term “gender lens investing” (GLI) entered the finance vocabulary in 2009. Its premise was simple. Treating gender as a financial variable, not an afterthought, would expand the economic pie rather than limit it, with benefits flowing to individual investors, companies and communities.

Veris began tracking the field of gender lens investing in 2013, publishing our first white paper on gender lens investing that same year. The following year, we won our first mandate to build a fully diversified gender lens portfolio, a $9 million mandate for a client focused on advancing women’s leadership. That early work helped shape the practice of GLI as it exists today.

Bending the Arc of Finance for Women and Girls, our fifth annual survey of the space, shares data about a field that is growing and changing. Inside the report you’ll see data showing that by mid-2018, assets in publicly available gender lens strategies (stocks, bonds and CDs built explicitly around gender balance and equity) had grown from $100 million to $2.4 billion in four years, and the number of available strategies had more than quadrupled, from eight to 35. The first billion dollars invested in public market GLI strategies took 25 years to arrive. The second billion took twelve months.

Inside the brief, you’ll find:

• How capital and new product offerings accelerated, as GLI grew from eight investment strategies in 2014 to 35 by 2018, spanning mutual funds, ETFs and separately managed accounts
• Portfolio case studies, including a foundation that committed its full endowment to gender equity and a donor advised fund built to address gender-based violence
• How the GLI ecosystem expanded to include pension fund investment, third-party certifications and research organizations tracking gender data
• How gender lens investors began shifting corporate practice, from gender pay gap disclosure to board composition

Racial & Gender Equity remains one of Veris’s four impact investment themes, and this brief is a record of how early, and how deliberately, our team worked to help build the market behind it.

Download the full 2018 report, including portfolio case studies, the data behind the growth of public market GLI strategies, and an early look at how gender lens investors began shifting corporate practice.