From Traction to Transformation: Reflections on the 2022 Summit

By Meg Massey

Power is a through-line across all asset classes, sectors, geographies, identities, and communities. It shapes our systems and how we interact with them every day, across every facet of our lives. 

And yet, power is not immutable, because “the future is not set in stone.”

Those words from poet Shagufta Iqbal at the start of the Gender Smart — and echoed by GenderSmart co-founder Suzanne Biegel at its conclusion — captured something at the heart of this year’s gathering: the drive to rethink and recreate what was once considered fixed. As GenderSmart’s Head of Content Sana Kapadia put it, “What are the artificial rules that are used to make this hard?”

Watch ‘Stone’, written for and performed at the 2022 Summit

GenderSmart delegates, who gathered in person in London from all over the world, know one thing for sure: Inequality is not inevitable. The clear disparities across gender and other identities in the global economy are the result of choices that are made and baked into systems. And the next step in the global gender-smart journey goes further than arguing for more women at the table. It’s about building a new table designed to face the challenges and opportunities of the twenty-first century and beyond. 

If that sounds like a radical statement, consider this: nobody has ever conducted a study showing that having a white male on an investment committee is ‘effective.’

Four years ago, at the first Gender Smart gathering in 2018, the much more nascent field was still focused on making the business case for gender-lens investing. The results of that effort are visible in the billions of dollars of capital shifted, the conversations now possible, and the barriers broken. “I don’t feel like somebody’s initiative, diversity hire, or experiment,” said Skoll Foundation COO Marla Blow. “I feel like a human.”

Now, there’s a palpable desire to go beyond putting more women into the existing system. Instead, the call to action over the course of the Summit was to truly integrate gender — in all of its complexities — across the value chain, leaving it transformed in the process. Or, as Visa Foundation’s Najada Kumbali put it during her plenary remarks, “We’re here to ask how we can move capital at scale with a gender lens — with integrity and intentionality.”

Today, the gender smart field is more mature, more mainstream, and more than ready to engage in deeper and messier questions about the power dynamics that undergird the norms in today’s financial system. 

“The barrier is the status quo. The conversation is the intervention.”

In a more sterile environment, uncomfortable conversations yield little more than uncomfortable silence. But the atmosphere at the 2022 Summit was one of rare vulnerability. After more than two years of massive global changes, including the COVID-19 pandemic that relocated community gatherings to Zoom, delegates were relieved to be back together in person, enjoying sustainable snacks and “fernside” chats — and championing ideas for change that might have seemed futuristic in 2019 but now feel like near-term imperatives.

In summing up the conversations in breakout sessions, Kapadia put it like this: “We need to get out of the mindset that money is the only measure of power.”

Does shifting power create more risk? For the gender-smart, only if your imagination does not extend beyond the status quo. The systemic risk of inequality — or, conversely, the risks posed by a homogenous “pale, male” group of decision-makers — makes gender lens investing a risk mitigator challenged by perception, not facts. Though leadership demographics are important, nearly all speakers underscored the need for gender to be part of the lens applied to all financial transactions, at all steps, in all of its forms.

In this context, the announcement of GenderSmart’s merger with the 2X Collaborative into 2X Global was an apt one. In multiple sessions, delegates acknowledged the impact of 2X’s criteria in framing the conversation — and also insisted that it be treated as the floor, not the ceiling. 

The more gender lens investing scales, the more pressure there is on the older systems. Scaling gender lens investing is scaling a new shift in power. As Northern Arc’s Kshama Fernandes told the crowd on Tuesday evening, “Value is the core principle of economics: when transaction costs become less, markets expand — so the easier we make it [GLI] the faster it will grow.

Like the norms that gender smart investors now challenge, this means answering Suzanne Biegel’s closing call: “Embed this so deeply that it can’t be separated.”