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.
This news is not only good for the sector of gender lens investing — it’s good news for the larger world as well, since there is growing evidence that when women have more access to financial resources, money often gets distributed more widely, and economies thrive.
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.
An analysis by Bloomberg combined public securities gender lens investing with estimates of other forms of gender-based investing and found that in 2017, over $1.3 billion had also been invested in private equity and venture capital at 50 funds using gender-based strategies. So if we add that $1.3 billion in with the $910 million, we’re at about $2.2 billion, or .00308%.
But it’s movement in the right direction. The financial sector will no doubt be paying more attention to gender lens investing in the future, as women become more fluent in exercising their financial power. Women in philanthropy are wise to look at gender lens investing as a close cousin of gender equality philanthropy — another important way to deploy funding for maximum female empowerment. We also need to look for ways to make the public aware of the benefits of gender lens investing, and make gender lens investing more accessible to different sectors of the economy — middle class investors, for example, and institutional investors.
Full report is here.
Related:Gender Matters All the Time: Gender Lens Investors(Opens in a new browser tab)
Gender Lens Experts: Women and Money Summit Coming Up Soon
