From Agence Française de Développement and UN Women. This report offers a unique perspective with concrete examples of how Public Development Banks (PDBs) have delivered on a gender equality agenda across their varied mandates, histories and methods of engagement. The report’s case-studies show both internal and external approaches and practices to tackling gender equality. It underlines and demonstrates the tremendous benefit for PDBs in understanding how to address and measure their own gender equality, either as organizations and/or with their partners, in order to create a more inclusive and equal world.

From ESCAP. This report describes the state of the unpaid care economy in ASEAN countries. By examining the socioeconomic, political, legislative and institutional conditions in each country of ASEAN, this report highlights examples of promising policy measures undertaken either prior to the COVID-19 pandemic or as emergency measures after its onset to address women’s unpaid care and domestic work. The report proposes recommendations to introduce a care-sensitive dimension into national and regional gender policies towards building back better and more equal.

From Big Society Capital. Social inequalities were a dominant concern in 2020, as a result of Covid-19 and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. These events led to overdue conversations around how we address systemic injustice. Big Society Capital has put these discussions front and centre, looking at how they can contribute to greater equality. Within these approaches, embedding an equality and equity lens across how they manage and measure impact, is key. They launched their revised Outcomes Matrix, first developed in partnership with New Philanthropy Capital (NPC), Social Value UK, Investing for Good and Outcomes Star, and is hosted by Good Finance. It has been an important practical impact management and measurement tool within the social impact investment sector. The tool has helped more than 40,000+ Good Finance users to plan and measure their social impact. With this redesign, they aim to embed an equality and equity lens in the way organisations measure outcomes. Ensuring that reducing inequality is at the forefront of conversations, when organisations are managing and measuring impact. In this blog post they explore how they went about the redesign process, the three key changes we have made and why.

By Ben Walker, Erin Roxburgh-Makea, Jesse Pirini, and Stephen Cummings. Walk into any boardroom or business school and you’ll often hear the same companies held up as models of excellence: Apple, Tesla, Google and so on. Sharing success stories from te ao Māori (the Māori world)? Not so much. And that’s a shame. There are many of them, and they can teach us how to manage and grow organisations in sustainable ways that benefit the wider community — goals that often elude large Western businesses.

By Alison Rose. As we’ve witnessed in recent months, our economic and social challenges are complex and interconnected. In order to achieve truly effective and sustainable solutions which benefit a broad spectrum of communities, we must not disenfranchise a diversity of entrepreneurs from making their economic contribution. We need to keep this at the forefront of our agendas, and ensure female entrepreneurship helps fuel a fairer, more productive future.

From Cambridge Associates. In this paper, Cambridge Associates demonstrates that climate change is also a social justice issue, given its disproportionate impact on women, people of color, lower income communities, and developing countries. They outline ways in which investors, including those pursuing a path to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions, can implement an intersectional approach to climate justice in portfolios, both holistically across themes and within each asset class. Lastly, they outline three steps investors should consider to help ensure our transition to a low-carbon economy is inclusive and just. Ultimately, they believe all investors would benefit from understanding the risks and opportunities associated with climate justice.

From Credit Suisse. The Credit Suisse Research Institute (CSRI)’s ‘Gender 3000 in 2021: Broadening the diversity discussion’ report:

• Tracks the changing gender profile of senior executives and boardrooms across global industries from a unique bottom up perspective.

• Reveals boardroom diversity continues to improve globally with an approximate average of 24% of women sitting in corporate boardrooms. The percentage of women in senior management positions (“C-suite” roles) has also improved to 20%.

• Illustrates a positive correlation between increased gender diversity in leadership positions and superior returns on capital, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and stock performance. The more pervasive diversity is within an organization, the stronger the relationship.

• Outlines the state of female representation in entrepreneurship. Over the past five years, the ratio of female-to male-founded start-ups is up from 0.62 to 0.73 but challenges remain for female founders.

From Baobab Consulting. In this edition of Baobab Consulting’s LinkedIn white paper, Omolara "Lara" Abiona investigates why African female entrepreneurs find it hard to access financing, sheds light on the complex relational dynamics that further impedes economic empowerment, and presents recommendations to address the access to finance gap on various level.

From HEC Paris. At the senior level, men outnumber women by a 10 to 1 ratio in the private equity sector. Considerations about gender equality notwithstanding, such a testosterone-only environment is not good for the bottom line. A large-scale study of investment deals by HEC Paris professor of strategy and business policy proves that teams with at least one female member dramatically outperform male-only teams. (An interview with Oliver Gottschalg.)

From FP Analytics. A sustainable, equitable, and just recovery from COVID-19 requires purposeful policy action to mitigate the worsening of structural inequalities and to address their root causes. This report synthesizes existing evidence of how women have been impacted by the pandemic, how governments have responded to date, and what is at stake if policymakers fail to enact more inclusive recovery measures. It also provides recommendations for rights-based policies, interventions, and investments underpinned by rigorous gender analysis. Finally, this report recognizes that “the women and girls who are furthest behind often experience multiple inequalities and intersecting forms of discrimination, including based on their sex, age, class, ability, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and migration status” and calls for an intersectional and nuanced approach to evidence-based policymaking that benefits everyone.

From CDC. Over the past year, CDC worked with a team at the London School of Economics Trade Policy Hub to better understand the impact of their trade and supply chain finance investments. This report highlights the main insights from the evidence review and outlines key opportunities for investors who are looking to deliver impact through trade and supply chain finance.

From Baker McKenzie. A comparison of the current UK and US positions regarding Board Diversity and DEI targets.

From The Work and Opportunities for Women (WOW) Programme in partnership with Primark. Women have been central to the Bangladesh garment workforce over recent decades, using the opportunity to financially support their families. However, many women are still expected to undertake most household chores and childcare. They often struggle to shoulder both long hours at work and unpaid work and care responsibilities. Unpaid work and care refers to unpaid time spent on activities within a household for its members including care of persons, housework and voluntary community work.

The WOW programme, in partnership with Primark, visited garment workers in communities and factories in Bangladesh in 2019. WOW’s research found that the women they interviewed are working a “double day”, spending an average of 7 hours on unpaid work, including child care and domestic work, in addition to their shift in the garment factory. The men interviewed spent considerably less time, with up to 2.5 hours spent on unpaid work and care activities. WOW also found that where men do help their wives, they often face backlash from their community.

From Hogan Lovells. This Guide is aimed at General Counsels who advise Boards on a regular basis. It looks at the legal considerations behind ethnicity pay gap reporting, in particular the data protection and employment concerns, that can become a perceived barrier to publishing these statistics.

It also seeks to debunk the legal myths that may prevent organisations from publishing their reports, and analyses the anatomy of a really powerful ethnicity pay gap report. The Guide is designed to start a crucial conversation about how to innovate in an area of policy and law that is in flux, beyond the obligations that have been in place for gender pay gap reporting since April 2017.

From Arabella Advisors. This report, updated in August 2021, explores how foundations, philanthropists, and impact investors can begin to address the biases they face, unlock access to capital, and build a more equitable economy for all through inclusive investing.

From XOCO Unlimited. This preview version of XOCO’s Action Guide for Investing in the Education of Adolescent Girls provides an overview of the opportunities available for investments in girls’ education, especially in the Global South.

From Xoco Unlimited. This toolkit presents the impact of the pandemic on women by evaluating the relationship of employment, healthcare, and digital literacy to gender-based violence (GBV).

From Deloitte. The venture capital (VC) industry appears to be making progress in achieving greater gender, racial, and ethnic diversity. Some progress has been made in expanding the representation of women in leadership positions, particularly for investing professionals. In addition, of the VC firms surveyed, more are adopting diversity and inclusion strategies than before, and firms with these strategies report having more diverse workforces than other VC firms. However, the pace of progress has been uneven across diversity demographics—there has been little increase in the representation of Black and Hispanic employees in the overall industry and in leadership positions. At the talent management level, few of the firms surveyed conduct employee surveys to assess their progress in creating a more inclusive workplace. While the improvements indicate a positive trend, the data indicates the industry has work to do to achieve a long-term diverse workforce.

These are some of the key findings of the third edition of the VC Human Capital Survey, powered by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), Venture Forward, and Deloitte to assess the state of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the VC industry. The survey provides a source of information that allows firms to benchmark themselves against industry practices and helps them identify innovative approaches to promote DEI.

From Harvard Business Review. Women who venture into entrepreneurship are not poised to get a fair deal. Kamal Hassan, Monisha Varadan, and Claudia Zeisberger argue that bias within the VC industry is preventing funds from being allocated to the best investment opportunities, so if we want both better VC outcomes and more gender balance in entrepreneurship, we need to root out the bias hampering ventures at their earliest stages. The research suggests that the pitching process is the best place to start.

From The Holding Co. and Pivotal Ventures. The Investor’s Guide to the Care Economy is the first study of its kind to quantify the market opportunity in care. For the first half of 2021, The Holding Co., in partnership with Pivotal Ventures, launched this initiative to investigate areas of care that show the most promise for investors, entrepreneurs, and corporations as the COVID-19 pandemic revealed just how inadequate our current care economy really is.

The report leverages data from 25+ market reports, 6 government data sources, 30+ expert interviews, 2 original national data collection surveys with 5000+ participants spread across both, and guidance from 40 stewardship and advisory council members who are leaders in care today. The report focuses on household and families willingness to pay, the role of government in igniting the private sector, and the role of insurance and employers to support care innovation.

This resource is designed to serve you in multiple ways. You can dive deep into a segment that resonates with you, pluck a data point for a pitch deck, or share the site more broadly to encourage others to look seriously at the care economy. We hope that this report inspires you to dedicate your investments, entrepreneurial energy, and collaboration to being part of this historic moment in care.