Celebrating Suzanne Biegel’s Life and Legacy
Suzanne Biegel was one of the pioneers who created the movement of gender lens investing and is considered a pioneer and thought leader in the gender-smart investing field. Suzanne dedicated her life and career to making finance more inclusive, impactful, and effective. She was the co-founder of GenderSmart which merged with 2X Collaborative in 2023 to form 2X Global.
Suzanne began her career at IBM in the early 1980s, and then was the CEO of IEC, a training and communications and then education technology firm. Since exiting IEC in 2000, Suzanne becamean active angel and venture capital investor, philanthropist, and board member, and played leadership roles in a variety of companies and projects. Suzanne was the founder of Catalyst at Large and an honorary board member of 2X Global.
Over her lifetime, she extensively leveraged her deep networks in finance, philanthropy, development, research, and entrepreneurship to connect public and private investors to the people and information they needed to move their capital in a gender-smart way. Her mission was to increase the flow of global capital to gender-smart investments and initiatives, generating the most impact, and to ensure that it reached the investment managers, entrepreneurs and innovators who needed it in the most efficient way possible.
Her work influenced hundreds of funds and institutional investors, and caused billions of dollars of capital to be moved in a way that is more "gender-smart." She worked with BII, UBS, IDB Invest, the US DFC, Tara Health Foundation, Linked Foundation, responSability, Circulate Capital, IEN, and many others. Suzanne was a fellow of the Aspen Institute and, under the Wharton ESG Initiative, she and the team produced Project SAGE, that canvassed the market for investing with a gender lens in private markets across private equity, venture capital and debt funds. The seminal GenderSmart Summit convened the full spectrum of actors across the capital spectrum and helped catalyse many initiatives that exist and thrive today. For example, the 2X Challenge that has now mobilised $27.3 billion in gender lens investments since 2018, was seeded by the Gender Finance Collaborative that Suzanne co-led.
Both climate and gender were at the heart of Suzanne’s portfolio. Through GenderSmart’s gender and climate investment working group in particular, she spearheaded groundbreaking work and research on how these two lenses could be combined to achieve greater impact on both climate mitigation and adaptation and gender equality.
In the summer of 2021, Suzanne was diagnosed with stage four metastatic lung cancer. As she considered the legacy she wanted to leave, Suzanne and her husband Daniel Maskit decided to establish a donor-advised fund to make investments and grants that would advance both climate and biodiversity solutions and gender equity. Heading for Change is the fruit of that vision, nurtured carefully by Suzanne until her passing in September 2023. Heading for Change seeks to continue her legacy, leveraging her unique network, insights, and generosity of social and economic capital to equip the next generation of gender- and climate-smart investors. The blended, multi-asset class demonstration portfolio of funds invests at the nexus of climate solutions and gender equity. It provides catalytic capital to gender-smart climate fund managers – and the innovators they back, as well as grants to help vital climate solutions get to market, scale, and effect change.
We are beyond grateful for Suzanne’s leadership and legacy, and for all she did to build and advance the field of gender finance. Thank you Suzanne for being the eternal Catalyst at Large.
Written by: Sana Kapadia