Gender-lens investing is smart investing: 5 things we learned from last week’s GenderSmart Investing Summit

As founding partners to the GenderSmart Investing Summit, my team spent two days last week attending the workshop-focused event in London, listening and learning from true experts in the field. For starters, they learned that companies with a female founder performed 63% better than those with all-male founding teams, but still there’s a disconnect between venture capital and female entrepreneurs. ?

So what’s it going to take to shift the needle? Having a global community of focused investment practitioners come together, to dig into how we can implement change by turning traction into transformation and action, surfaced so many great insights and ideas.

It’s impossible to list everything in just one post, but here are 5 key things which the UBS team took away.

1.??????Applying a gender lens to how we invest is a commercial and economic imperative

2.??????Let’s use multidimensional thinking to reframe fiduciary duty and growth so that we can act on solutions in a collaborative and collective way

3.??????Stop thinking about women as beneficiaries and victims that we need financial solutions to solve for. Instead, get more women into those central positions of power within the boardroom to cement their role as key market actors. That way they help to move conversations on, shift mindsets and allocate capital in ways that will make a real world difference

4.??????Use the power of storytelling and language to ask tough questions and reach different audiences

5.??????Bring men on this journey too. Give them the tools and conversations they need to convince their clients (of all genders) of this economic imperative

Gender lens investing isn’t an ‘add-on’, it’s an ‘and’ to how we currently invest or plan portfolios. It spans all asset classes and investment opportunities. It’s also intersectional – just think about climate change. Women across the world are significantly more likely to be impacted by climate change, in terms of health, education and access to finance.?

So although the goal is to deploy more capital in a gender-smart way, we still need to make sure those gatekeepers to capital have the right tools, information and above all, mindset, to integrate a gender lens within their investment decisions, right across the capital spectrum.

As gender-lens investing comes of age, a lesson in basic economics from the founder of Northern Arc really stood out to us: “The easier you make it to invest with a gender-lens the quicker the market will grow.” Kshama Fernandes

Now that’s just smart.

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