Ruth Shaber is the Founder and President of Tara Health Foundation, a co-founder of Rhia Ventures, and an active gender focused investor in her personal portfolio. She is also co-author of a new book which makes a persuasive data-led financial case for investing with a gender and broader diversity lens for as-yet-unconverted mainstream allocators. We discuss the risks of not paying attention, and what it will really take to shift the status quo.

Diana van Maasdijk is the CEO of Equileap, a data provider that assesses 4,000 companies globally on 19 criteria including gender balance, the gender pay gap, paid parental leave and anti-sexual harassment policies. We speak with her about the findings of the just-published 2022 Gender Equality Global Report and Ranking, what’s improved and what still needs to happen to push companies and investors further towards gender parity.

Patricia Hamzahee is an investor and co-founder of UK-based Extend Ventures. Her team’s November 2020 research, Diversity Beyond Gender, into access to funding for diverse founders in the UK was the first of its kind, and they have recently been commissioned for similar research in the European context. Patricia speaks to us about the particular challenges facing UK investors when it comes to investing with an equity lens, and what they’re doing to build a better evidence base.

Tara Murphy Forde shares how Global Partnerships’ mission and impact-first strategy have guided the organisation’s commitment to inclusion; and how their approach has evolved over time to consider not only poverty, but also gender, geography, race, and ethnicity as intersectional drivers of exclusion.

The five-year Pacific RISE program, an Australian Government DFAT funded initiative in partnership with Criterion Institute, is coming to an end in July 2021. The program, focused on building the impact investment market in the Pacific, found a number of challenges in implementing a gender lens in investment endemic to impact investing as a whole. In addressing these, Pacific RISE generated influential new insights and transferable learnings for gender lens investors worldwide.

We now have a wealth of gender data at our fingertips, but with so many different needs and goals within the gender-smart investing community it can be challenging to make it fit for context. The following unmet gender data needs, identified during a recent online working session, are an opportunity to work more efficiently as a community and move further, faster, and smarter together.

The language used by the impact investing community goes a long way to shaping what gets seen, valued, measured and funded. Is it time to evolve how we speak about gender and diversity?

Ruth Shaber MD is the founder and president of the Tara Health Foundation, which promotes health, well-being, and opportunity for women and girls through innovative evidence-informed programs. She is also the co-founder and board chair of Rhia Ventures, a group of foundations and investors that collaborate to bring new types of capital and enterprise to the field of reproductive health in the United States.

The following conversation took place on February 18, 2020, and is the first of a two-part interview series.