Just Good Investing: Why Gender Matters to Your Portfolio and What You Can Do About It

From Calvert Impact Capital. This seminal paper on gender-lens investing shares practical guidance for creating a gender inclusive investment strategy, learned from evolving the authors’ own gender-lens investment approach:

• Set realistic expectations based on the type of capital you are investing. This, more than anything, practically defines the opportunities that are available to you to invest for impact and the approach you can take to incorporate gender

• Understand the tools at your disposal. The tools to incorporate gender into investment decision-making and analysis vary based on the type of capital and the level of influence and ownership that capital affords the investor

• Gender-lens investing is an art, not a science, and context matters. Gender’s role in investing is nuanced and success looks different depending on the context (e.g., market, geography, sector, etc.)

Incorporating gender into investment analysis might be the quickest route to better performing investments and a more equitable and sustainable world. There’s no one, right way to incorporate gender into your investments. It’s not rocket-science, it’s not niche. It has the potential to improve both financial performance and social impact. In short, it’s just good investing, so get started today.