Unlocking business and social impact through gender mainstreaming: the power of metrics and tools
by Jessica Graf
Photo credit: Juntas Peru
Three years ago, LeFil Consulting, a consulting firm specialising in creating sustainable social and economic value set out to get some definitive answers to long-standing questions about the benefits of gender mainstreaming.
Specifically, we were seeking answers about the tangible benefits for social enterprises.
Questions included:
What are the business and social benefits from investing into gender?
Which venture profiles are ‘better’ at implementing gender mainstreaming initiatives?
Which type of gender initiatives generate the biggest impact?
And which are the ‘must have’ metrics to track?
The journey to find these answers led to the creation of the Gender Scaling Financing Facility (GSFF). Designed and implemented by LeFil Consulting, the GSFF was funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and supported through Pro Mujer.
Between 2021 and 2024, the GSFF worked with 135 social entrepreneurs in 15 countries across Central and South America, such as Mexico, Colombia and Peru, helping them to mainstream gender into their strategy, operations and daily practices, while offering both technical assistance and ever-increasing funding windows.
A diverse range of ventures were selected across these 15 countries, in order to eventually demonstrate that these efforts would be relevant and possible for most. The organisations selected spanned 12 sectors including financial solutions, agriculture and healthcare and featured diverse team structures (e.g., solo and multiple founders). The enterprises were also at varying stages of maturity, including in terms of team size, revenue and profit levels.
Over the course of the two years, the GSFF team kept a close and regular cadence of checks, monitoring 37 different metrics across all the organisations and checking in every three months.
Throughout this process, extensive quantitative and qualitative data was collected about the ongoing efforts to better mainstream gender in these ventures’ work in ways both large and seemingly small.
Now, the findings of the GSFF have been detailed in a ground-breaking report, Gender Mainstreaming – A Powerful Performance Lever for Both Impact and Business.
Photo credit: Visión RB Grupo Óptico
The report provides clear, evidence-backed answers about the actual benefits that gender mainstreaming bring in terms of business and impact performance. The findings show that ventures that implemented gender-focused improvement initiatives saw, among other:
35% increase in earned revenues
68% growth in the number of clients or end beneficiaries
20% rise in female staff
18% increase in female leadership
14% reduction in staff turnover
22% improvement in client or user satisfaction
43% more staff trained in gender mainstreaming
27% more suppliers trained in gender mainstreaming
Even more compellingly, these gains were achieved with minimal investment – approximately USD 2,555 per venture – underscoring gender mainstreaming as a high-return strategy for growth and impact.
To achieve these results, most social enterprises (74%) chose to focus on making their products and outreach efforts more gender inclusive and sensitive; while 45% focused on internal improvements, such as increasing diversity through more gender-balanced hiring, leadership, and staff retention.
The latter type of gender-focused improvement initiatives interestingly delivered the greatest performance jumps, while the former, more commonly chosen initiatives showed more modest, though still positive results.
Also, while ventures led by gender-diverse founders’ teams performed better overall, no specific profile –in terms of sector, country, size, maturity, or financial performance – is a good predictor of success. In other words, any venture can integrate gender strategies effectively. However, a notable difference emerged between male-led and female-led ventures: male-led ventures prioritised revenue growth and team diversity when engaging in gender work, while female-led ventures focused more on expanding their customer and user base.
Another significant outcome of this research was the identification of the 12 most relevant and actionable indicators to track gender-related impact, based on their widespread availability among social enterprises, and their level of correlation with performance jumps induced by gender-related improvement initiatives. These 12 key metrics offer ventures and investors a clear and practical way to drive and track meaningful change.
Standardised Metrics
Proportion of women in your organisation’s staff
Proportion of women in your organisation’s leadership
Proportion of staff (very) satisfied with work in your organisation
Annual growth rate in earned revenue of your organisation
Annual percentage increase in the number of customers/ users/ end beneficiaries served by your organisation
Proportion of women among customers/ users/ end beneficiaries served by your organisation
Proportion of customers/ users/ end beneficiaries (very) satisfied with your organisations’ product/ service
Proportion of woman customers/ users/ end beneficiaries of your organisation who feel (very) empowered by your product/ service
Proportion of your organisations’ strategic suppliers achieving better gender inclusion and diversity among their teams, leadership, or Boards of Directors
Non-standardised metrics
Level of average productivity achieved by your organisation’s staff (in specific, pre-defined productivity metrics)
Effectiveness of your organisation's communication tools/ activities aimed at end users/ customers/ beneficiaries
Average level of production/productivity of strategic suppliers, as a result of the implementation of gender-inclusive policies (in specific, pre-defined production/ productivity metrics)
Lastly, to help ventures and investors maximise the benefits of gender mainstreaming, the research served as the foundation to develop two practical tools:
Initiative selection tool – helps ventures and investors determine which gender initiatives would yield the most significant improvements based on benchmarked data.
Performance tracking tool – assists ventures and investors in selecting the most relevant metrics to track progress and quantify success, offering benchmarks to set realistic improvement targets.
To find more about the research, explore the full report here, or discover the Swiss Development Cooperation funded flagship facility that accelerated close to 140 social enterprises on the topic of gender, and provided the data to bring these insights to the sector.
