The pandemic has brought the care economy into focus as a lever for systemic change and gender equality. As we launch the GenderSmart care economy initiative, Sana Kapadia explains why it’s time to address the full spectrum of care work, globally, in both formal and informal economies.

In spite of increasing interest, there are still relatively few pension funds applying an intentional gender lens to their investments beyond board diversity. We assess the opportunities and challenges for pensions in key global markets, and speak to a few early movers tapping into a broader spectrum of opportunity.

Brightlight Impact’s Head of Investment Management Simba Marekera talks about the development and implementation of a radically inclusive community infrastructure strategy in New Zealand.

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.

What can development actors, philanthropists and foundations do to support the field of gender lens investing? Suzanne Biegel lists seven high impact strategic levers that could have an exponential impact on the movement of gender lens capital globally.

Seema Hingorani has been CIO of the New York City Retirement Systems, founded nonprofit Girls Who Invest and investment firm SevenStep Capital to address the diversity gap in investment management, and nearly two years ago joined Morgan Stanley Investment Management as a Managing Director on the senior leadership team. She speaks to GenderSmart about the evolution of her gender-focused investing approach and finding investment talent in surprising places.

COVID has accentuated the importance of building resilient and sustainable supply chains - an aspiration which can only be achieved by diversifying and appropriately financing scalable diverse, local, women-owned, -led, and -impact businesses.

We sat down with Jennifer Choi, Managing Director of Industry Affairs for the Institutional Limited Partners Association (ILPA), to discuss their Diversity in Action initiative, the challenges of capturing diversity metrics in a global context, and the actions LPs and GPs can implement to advance diversity, equity and inclusion.

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.

Investors often gravitate toward opportunities in technology, energy and financial services as the best way to deploy their $1 billion impact funds. The result, says Laura Callanan, is that impact investors are missing the large swath of the global economy where women, youth, indigenous peoples, and others can be found: the creative economy.

The COVID-19 Pandemic made a significant impact on gender lens investing over the last year. GenderSmart’s Suzanne Biegel and VC Include’s Bahiyah Yasmeen Robinson share learnings from the Capital Connect ‘un-showcases’ to date, and the massive market opportunity in gender-smart private market (VC, PE, private debt) investment funds.

It’s time to reverse the burden of case-making by asking mainstream investors to justify their weddedness to legacy approaches and allocations.

Last year, our pathways to employment report highlighted the need to rebuild the social infrastructure around adolescent girls and young women by rethinking how we invest in products and services. Similarly, the persistent gender digital divide calls for the application of a gender lens to how we provide and use funding to close this gap.

If you take a quick glance at the agri businesses in West-Africa, what you see is a male dominated sector. Typically, financiers look at who sells the commodities (men), who is registered as owner of the land (men). and who is more likely to have a full-time written contract (men). It’s as if women do not exist in the agri value chains. But the opposite is true.

A focus on equality and gender has to be an integral part of green investments and policy actions, not an addition or afterthought. EBRD write about their work to integrate gender across a range of programmes over the last year, providing financing, policy dialogue and technical assistance.

We had a conversation with Ingrid Leong, CIO for the Houssian Foundation, asking her to look back on her experience aligning the Foundation’s investment strategy with gender lens investing and creating a fully mission-aligned investment portfolio. She offered her honest reflections and advice for those starting out on this journey.

We talk about scarcity mentality versus the regenerative economy with Rachel J. Robasciotti, Founder & CEO of Adasina Social Capital, and why investing in alignment with social justice movements just makes financial sense.

First-time women-led funds present an untapped source of alpha and impact. GenderSmart’s First Time Women Led and Diverse Funds Initiative offers an overview of why and how you should be investing in these funds as an opportunity to contribute to the promotion of gender equality on a deeper and wider scale.

GenderSmart and VC Include announce the first-ever global showcase with the goal of connecting gender-smart investors and fund managers with a gender lens.

EIB’s Moa Westman outlines four key gender-responsive climate actions, which can strengthen climate and environmental outcomes and, often, are also a business and market opportunity. They help expand the customer base, enhance customer satisfaction, improve financial and business performance, and attract more investments from impact investors.