From Courageous Conversation to Action Around Racial Equity
Like many impact investors, the gender-smart community needs to level up when it comes to intersectionality. How might we improve our investment processes and individual understanding to better serve women of colour? Reflections from a recent GenderSmart community conversation.
By Carey Bohjanen
On 4 June 2020 the GenderSmart team convened a special virtual session to consider how we show up for racial equality as an investment community and as committed individuals. When I was asked to moderate the session, I hesitated. Was a half-Finnish, half-Chinese woman of privilege living in Dubai the right person to do it justice? But change starts with each and every one of us and we all have a role to play in being part of the solution. So I swallowed hard and said yes.
As a facilitator, my role is usually to create a safe space for people to feel seen and heard. In this case, we needed to be uncomfortable and awkward – maybe even painfully so. I framed the discussion as what David Whyte calls a ‘Courageous Conversation’. It’s the conversation about the unspoken invisibilities, the things we haven’t dealt with but need to discuss. Racial injustice has been ignored for the convenience or comfort of those involved for too long - it needs addressing now.
How is the investment community failing people of colour, particularly black women and non-black women of colour?
“Investing in massive funds without designing for the people we want to invest with”
“Not insisting on who has a seat at the table: failing to look for women of colour specifically”
“Failing to make sure all voices are heard at every meeting”
“Not using my voice and power as a non-black POC loud enough, and playing nice within the system, rather than helping to chart new pathways”
“Not doing enough to raise up other women beside me so that we’re not the only ones in the investment community”
“Assuming that my white friends think like me and not having all of the conversations that I need to be having with them”
“Being too careful about pushing companies to disclose on metrics to measure progress”
“Failing to always bring an intersectional lens to my work on gender equality”
This question, posed early in the session by Tracy Gray of The 22 Fund, yielded some suitably uncomfortable responses (shared anonymously, right). Participants recognised that a gender lens is not enough – the gender-smart investment community needs intersectionality at the crossroads of race and gender. There was also recognition that change starts with ownership at an individual level and that we each have a role to play whether big or small.
What could we be doing differently?
A number of commitments and proposals were made at the individual and institutional level, including “build back better”- a phrase which triggered frustration in several participants. The expression is often used in the context of post-disaster recovery and has more recently become a rallying cry to recover from COVID-19. In the context of COVID-19 and the now-global race-related conflagration, the question is build back to what? And better for whom?
As an investment community, we can’t go back to what we already know and rebuild the same exclusionary system. We can’t reference the same starting point when we know that it has consistently and repeatedly excluded people of colour and particularly black women and non-black women of colour. We need to build a new system altogether, along with new ways of being, doing and investing that are inclusive and representative.
We must also heed the call to be held accountable. The message is clear: We cannot just say these things in a one-off moment of reflection. We must commit to real action, real change in our words, policies, actions, investment criteria, reporting. It’s time to put our money where our collective mouth is. No more silence, no sitting in the safety of the sidelines, no complicity through inaction. As a community we can and should actively set standards and goals on racial and gender equality and report on a frequent basis to determine if we’ve made good against our commitments. That could take any number of forms; it just needs to happen.
Here are some specific and actionable suggestions made on the call:
Find an “accountability buddy” to ensure your intentions translate into action - “make the hire, send the wire”
Proactively expand your networks (for white investors) to ensure better representation of POC in dealflow and decision-making
Engage in shareholder activism to hold public companies accountable to racial justice commitments
Engage in broader field-level conversation and analysis of power, that includes both gender and race
This is the time to stand together, to learn and listen, and to both raise and answer the call to action. The gender-smart investment community must be part of the solution, as uncomfortable or inconvenient as it might be.
Carey Bohjanen is a Partner and Chief Strategist at FutureWomenX and a founding Partner of Adansonia Capital Partners. Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash