Gender Lens Investing

Chapter 4From Womenomics to Gender Lens Investing

“Contrary to what many people argue, gender equality is not a zero-sum game in which women win only at the expense of men losing. In fact, gender equality may be the best thing that ever happened to men.”¹

—Michael Kimmel, Financial Times, International Women's Day 2015

The evidence is insurmountable. The case has been made. Women are hugely important to the global economy. The obvious next step is to pair economic reality with the significance of women in investment analysis, or to delve deeper into gender lens investing.

The latter lacks a consistent definition and board understanding, and is replete with misconceptions, including the following: that gender lens investing is only about investing in women; will ultimately underperform major benchmarks; is mostly about microfinance; and is just another approach to negatively screen for stocks. Reality is different.

Simply put, gender lens investing is the deliberate incorporation of gender factors into investment analysis and decisions. To expand on this description of the process, it helps to look at each of the three words: gender, lens, and investing.

First, gender and sex are not the same. Your sex, male or female, refers to biology; gender is sociocultural. A female executive might say, “It's due to my sex that I am able to have a baby but to my gender that my comments are not heard in a meeting.” Conversely, a male executive might think, “Due to my sex I'm at greater risk ...