From Morgan Stanley. Building a truly inclusive society will require concerted action across governments, nonprofits, corporations and investors. We increasingly understand the benefits of advancing racial equity, but aren’t necessarily aware of the available tools for investors to pursue this goal. Whether considering restriction screening, promoting diverse ownership and representation, or delving into shareholder engagement and reporting, advancing racial equity through investment capital is a journey of discovery, understanding and action.

From Duke University. This program took place March 11-13, 2019 and September 9-11, 2019 at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. This 3-day intensive course is designed to help you navigate the emerging world of gender smart investing so that you can develop tangible strategies and practice to more easily and quickly integrate gender smart investing as part of an overall investing practice. Two of the top globally recognized pioneers in gender lens and impact investing (Suzanne Biegel, Catalyst at Large and GenderSmart Investing, and Cathy Clark, CASE i3 Initiative on Impact Investing at Duke University) will lead the training, sharing their insights and working with you on the key practices of gender lens investing.

From the Global Business Certification Standard for Gender Equality. EDGE is the leading global assessment methodology and business certification standard for gender equality. It measures where organizations stand in terms of gender balance across their pipeline, pay equity, effectiveness of policies and practices to ensure equitable career flows as well as inclusiveness of their culture. EDGE stands for Economic Dividends for Gender Equality and is distinguished by its rigor and focus on business impact.

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.

From the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). IRIS+ is the generally accepted system for measuring, managing, and optimizing impact. All investors and companies create positive and negative effects on society and the environment. Impact investors seek to maximize the positive and minimize the negative by using the IRIS+ system to integrate social and environmental factors into investment decisions alongside risk and return.

Credible, comparable impact data are needed to inform impact investment decisions and drive greater impact results. IRIS+ solves for this by increasing data clarity and comparability, and it provides streamlined, practical, how-to guidance that impact investors need, all in one easy-to-navigate system. It is a free, publicly available resource that is managed by the GIIN – the global champion of impact investing.

From the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). The Navigating Impact Project is where the GIIN, together with experts in different investment themes, identify best practices, research, and recommended metrics for each investment theme. This will make sure they are relevant, practical, and set the standard for best practice. Once these resources have gone through the IRIS+ rigorous standards development process, they are uploaded into IRIS+ and made available to a wider audience.

Through the content provided, investors, enterprises, and other stakeholders in the impact investing ecosystem can explore Impact Themes such as Energy Access, Gender, Education, Sustainable Forestry, Sustainable Water Management, and others. Each of these Impact Themes includes a series of Strategic Goals that show common impact intentions that investors and enterprises may have within that space For example, under the Impact Theme on Smallholder Agriculture, Strategic Goals include “Improved Access to Training and Information,” “Improved Farm Profitability,” and “Improved Food Security,” among others.

Each Strategic Goal includes a research-based overview of the problem and how investments can work toward solutions, an evidence map, a starter kit of metrics that are shown to indicate progress toward that strategic goal, and curated resources that can help practitioners measure and manage their impact most effectively.

From Morgan Stanley. Gender diversity, as a financial consideration for investors, is accelerating. This is driven by a growing body of research that shows increased diversity and a more inclusive workforce can be attributes of strong performance, as well as by a desire from asset managers to use their financial resources as a tool to drive social change and greater gender equality. Regardless of the original motivation for considering gender diversity, this primer seeks to clarify the range of approaches and opportunities available for investors to successfully integrate gender diversity criteria into an investment portfolio.

From the Diverse Asset Managers Initiative (DAMI). This guide is designed for institutional investors (trustees and staff), primarily of public, corporate, faith, and labor union pension funds, as well as foundation and university endowments, who are interested in exploring the possibilities of investing institutional assets with diverse-owned asset management firms.

By Tracy Gray & Emilie Cortes. Foundations and impact investors need to face the ways they are complicit in perpetuating inequality through their capital allocations, and upend five structural investment barriers to better serve women and people of color. Tracy Gray and Emilie Cortes set out five structural barriers that foundation investors and investment committees can easily upend today in their due diligence process to improve outcomes for people of color—especially underrepresented Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people—and women.

From the International Finance Corporation (IFC). This study explores the link between financial returns and gender diversity; the lack of women in the industry; and steps needed to achieve gender balance. One of the key findings of the report is that private equity and venture capital funds with gender-balanced senior investment teams generated 10 percent to 20 percent higher returns compared with funds that have a majority of male or female leaders.

The report draws on gender diversity and performance data from more than 700 funds and 500 portfolio companies; survey results from over 500 fund managers and institutional investors; interviews with more than 50 investors and gender diversity experts; and case studies of more than 10 private equity and venture capital funds and institutional investors that are addressing the gender-imbalance in their own work. The report also gathers recommendations for fund managers and institutional investors to help move the industry towards gender balance.

From G-SEARCh: Investors often ask for information on how to kickstart their GLI journey. Many useful resources are available to do this. However, this brief addresses a gap in information on the tools and approaches used to design and implement gender-smart technical assistance for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to improve their social and financial performance. G-SEARCh also shares reflections from their collective experience to date.

From Convergence. Blended finance is the use of catalytic capital from public or philanthropic sources to increase private sector investment in sustainable development. This blended finance primer leverages Convergence's database of historical blended finance transactions to generate unique insights about the blended finance market to date.

Edited by Elsa De Morais Sarmento and R. Paul Herman. This is a guide to the growing world-wide movement of Impact Investing. Impact investors seek to realize lasting, beneficial improvements in society by allocating capital to sources of impactful and sustainable profit. This handbook is a how-to guide for institutional investors, including family offices, foundations, endowments, governments, and international organizations, as well as academics, students, and everyday investors globally. The handbook´s wide-ranging contributions from around the world make a powerful case for positive impact and profit to fund substantive, lasting solutions that solve critical problems across the world.

From University of Toronto. This Coursera couse is aimed at helping the student become an Expert in Gender Analytics. Apply inclusive analytic techniques and human-centred design to generate innovative products, services, processes and policies using intersectional gender-based insights. Students will examine how policies, products, services & processes have gendered outcomes that miss out on opportunities or create needless risks; get comfortable with concepts such as sex, gender, gender identity & intersectionality, and how seeing through these lenses can lead to innovation; learn qualitative & quantitative analytical techniques to uncover intersectional gender-based insights, paying special attention to unheard voices; and use human-centred design to create innovative solutions that will help the student become a transformational leader.

From Gender and the Economy. This Self-Assessment Survey guides you through the process of understanding your own competency levels for Gender Analytics, and identifies your strengths as well as areas to improve. These competencies are outlined in the Gender Analysis Competency Framework document.

This Self-Assessment is designed for your own learning purposes. The results will help you set learning goals during the program and may be used as reference when working on your Personal Development Plan. Results will not be shared with other learners.

From Gender and the Economy. The Gender Analysis Competency Framework is a description of the knowledge, skills and behaviours required to conduct gender analysis. The framework outlines the core competencies for varying levels of experience.

The Framework is broken into three sections:

1. The 5 W’s (What, Why, Where, When and Who of Gender Analysis)

2. How: Applying Gender Analysis

3. Organizational and Cultural Support

While the competencies are separated out into individual categories, they are clearly interrelated.

By Cathy Clark, Jed Emerson, Ben Thornley. This book offers precise details on what, exactly, impact investing entails, embodied in the experiences and best and proven practices of some of the world's most successful impact investors, across asset classes, geographies and areas of impact. The book discusses the parameters of impact investing in unprecedented detail and clarity, providing both context and tools to those eager to engage in the generational shift in the way finance and business is being approached in the new era of Collaborative Capitalism.

The book presents a simple thesis with clarity and conviction: "Impact investing can be done successfully. This is what success looks like, and this is what it requires." With much-needed lessons for practitioners, the authors view impact investing as a harbinger of a new, more "multilingual" (cross-sector), transparent, and accountable form of economic leadership.

From CDC. Guidance on gender-smart investing and gender-smart approaches to build value for businesses, including an overview of gender-smart investing; guidance and tools on integrating gender in the investment process; steps, tools and templates to assess, implement and measure gender value creation opportunities; approaches to increasing gender diversity in the workplace; guidance on applying a gender lens to the evaluation of investments across global sectors; and case studies.

From the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and CDC Group. More clarity and guidance is needed by fund managers to understand how to put gender-smart investing into practice. To fill this knowledge gap, IFC, in partnership with CDC and support from the Government of Canada, developed Private Equity and Value Creation: A Fund Manager’s Guide to Gender-smart Investing. The Guide is a practical step-by-step road map for fund managers on how to strengthen gender diversity within their own firms and incorporate a gender focus into investment operations. It combines learnings from CDC and IFC’s experience with over 160 fund managers and draws on best practices with a series of case studies from stakeholders across the industry.