Suzanne Biegel was one of the pioneers who created the movement of gender lens investing and is considered a pioneer and thought leader in the gender-smart investing field. Suzanne dedicated her life and career to making finance more inclusive, impactful, and effective.

Tatjana Gerling, 2X Global’s Ambassador for Japan, shares her thoughts with 2X Global about responsible investing, the investment landscape in Japan and the opportunities to build upon and strengthen the gender lens investing ecosystem in Japan.

How is gender finance to reach its ultimate aim of getting better gender equity and broader social and environmental impact if gender expertise is not valued as much as business and financial outcomes?

The field offers the potential to advance positive change around a wide range of issues tied to gender equality and justice. This is why it has long sought to capture impact beyond the representation of women on boards or a count of women-led businesses. Naming specific gender-transformative outcomes has convened a robust community around a shared agenda and, in recent years, increasing discourse among those in the field of gender lens investing has shifted from why gender lens investing matters, to what ‘good’ gender lens investing looks like.

Those who have the capital to invest (institutional investors and private asset owners) and those who manage capital (asset and wealth managers) are increasingly realising the benefits of investing with gender and other forms of diversity. To support these efforts, the Gender Smart JEDI Investing community has updated its Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI) Investing Principles in Action toolkit with a new series of guides. Khetsiwe Diamini, whose consultancy Triple C Advisory partnered with GenderSmart for the project, shares some of the thinking behind it.

Halla Tómasdóttir is CEO and Chief Change Catalyst for The B Team, a group of global business and civil society leaders driving a better way of doing business for the well-being of people and the planet. As well as having leadership roles in Corporate America with M&M and Pepsi Cola, Halla was the first female CEO of the Iceland Chamber of Commerce and later went on to co-found Auður Capital, an investment firm with the vision of incorporating feminine values into finance. In 2016, Tómasdóttir was an independent candidate for President of Iceland, earning nearly 30% of the vote.

Halla joined GenderSmart to share her thoughts on the changes (or lack thereof) she has seen within the gender lens investing world over the past fifteen years, why we need to embrace feminine models of leadership and why she believes that quotas can benefit everyone.

Dreilinden is a German-based nonprofit organisation dedicated to advancing social acceptance of gender and sexual diversity, via grants, social investments and networking. Dreilinden’s founder and CEO, Ise Bosch, has 25 years of funding experience in human rights, women and sexual minorities, and is co-author of Giving with Trust, a book about turning the power of money into power for the many.

GenderSmart spoke to Ise, along with Investment Committee member and founder of Impact Advisors LLC, Stefan Bollier, about their work enabling intersectional LGBTQIA communities across the Global South and Global East to access mainstream finance.

Meg Massey reflects on the key themes of the 2022 GenderSmart Investing Summit, and what it might truly take to transform systems of finance.

As we open the GenderSmart Investing Summit 2022 today, Suzanne Biegel reflects on the key actions needed to move the field forward and shift the needle in both numbers and impact. What do we most need to do to move more capital with more velocity and to greater effect?

Robyn Oates is a Sustainable Finance Specialist at UN Women. She is passionate about developing impact-centric standards, products and partnerships to support the sustainable financing ecosystem, including gender lens investing. She shares how UN Women is working with capital market actors to strengthen the credibility of gender lens investing, as well as her thoughts on how we can encourage different players in the space to work more effectively together.

Tim Radjy is Founder and Managing Partner of the AlphaMundi Group and Chair of the Gender Lens Initiative for Switzerland (GLIS), an initiative housed by the non-profit association Sustainable Finance Geneva (SFG). Tim shares his insights into scaling gender lens investing (GLI) in emerging markets, following his session at the 2022 Virtual Programme.

Katherine Pease is Managing Director at Pathstone, an investment advisory firm working with family offices and institutions across the US. We spoke to her about the challenges in unlocking larger pools of gender-smart capital, what clients are paying attention to, and why it’s critical to get better at communicating gender’s relevance across investment portfolios and thematics.

Equality Fund launched in 2019, with a $300M anchor from Global Affairs Canada. They recently launched their investment theory of change, which centres historically excluded grassroots feminist movements. We spoke to Director, Investment Strategy Adaora Ogbue about how their model seeks to disrupt systems of finance, and why it’s critical to align their investments - not just grantmaking - with deep gender impact.

Emma Wheeler, Head of Women’s Wealth at UBS Global Wealth Management, on the increasing importance of gender-smart investing solutions for advisors and how the financial services industry is unlocking women’s wealth.

Lilian Mramba is Regional Director, Africa at Grassroots Business Fund, where she manages the investment portfolio, business advisory, and impact measurement activities. She spoke to us about the gender finance challenges and opportunities on the continent in the wake of COVID, and the need for more rigorous analysis to prevent ‘genderwashing’.

Women of the World Endowment (WoWE) was created with a bold vision—build a $5B endowment, over the next 10 years, to centralise the role of women as economic, environmental, and social changemakers who are creating a high growth future. Investment Manager Pooja Eppanapally spoke to us about mainstreaming gender finance, evolving definitions, and their approach to impact and measurement.

Marco Serena is the Group Head of Sustainable Development at the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG), which designs and invests in infrastructure projects across emerging markets. Marco’s remit is to oversee the early stage impact assessment of all PIDG investments, and to deepen sustainable impact including on gender and climate. He spoke to us about the challenges and learnings from PIDG’s work to date, and what’s on the horizon for gender-smart infrastructure investments.

Aunnie Patton Power is the founder of Intelligent Impact, an innovative finance advisory firm and a university lecturer on Innovative Finance, Impact Investing and Technology for Impact. She is also the author of Adventure Finance: How to Create a Funding Journey that Blends Profit and Purpose, and is starting a new book about alternative funding structures. We spoke to her about the most impactful lever and strategies for getting more capital flowing to women (and especially women of colour) - and how traditional structures can fall short.

Paid and unpaid care and domestic work are vital to both the economy and society; yet they remain invisible, undervalued and under-rewarded, and unevenly distributed. In the first of a series of blogs, Rebecca Calder, Emily Boost and Aurelie Faugier at Kore Global present a framework to help define investable care economy opportunities as part of their ecosystem mapping work.

Shinsei Bank was the first Japanese Banking Group to launch an impact investing fund, and now has two funds focused on investments into businesses tackling the life challenges that are faced by the working population, including childcare, elder care, healthcare, work-life balance and work-style innovations. We spoke to Chunmei Huang and Sayaka Takatsuka, Managing Director and Senior Director on the Impact Investment Team of Shinsei Corporate Investment Limited in the Shinsei Bank Group, about their approach and growing the Japanese impact investing ecosystem.