Constraints breed creativity. Investors with the determination (or mandate) to keep capital flowing through the COVID crisis are turning physical constraints into opportunities to address long-standing inefficiencies and biases in due diligence processes.

The COVID-19 crisis has spurred rapid investment in public health responses such as testing and vaccines, and rightly so. But the novel coronavirus isn’t solely a health crisis: it’s also a social and economic crisis that is impacting and reshaping every part of our lives.

ImpactAlpha’s David Bank challenged investors to “10x” impact investing, to grow total assets under management from billions to trillions and to develop “moonshot ideas” that could catalytically grow our impact.

It got me thinking: What would it take to 10x gender-lens investing?

In the second week of March, following the difficult announcement that due to the COVID-19 crisis we would be postponing the GenderSmart Investing Summit to December, I received an invitation.

In the face of a global crisis the magnitude of COVID-19, each of us have different ways of coping.

Earlier this month, Veris Wealth Partners published their latest figures on the size and growth of gender lens products in public markets. 

It’s a classic question in investing: do you go for scale or do you go for depth?

The gender lens investing community knows that one of the persistent obstacles blocking the flow of capital is the time and effort spent raising funds for private capital vehicles.

Here are six things investors and financial thought leaders who care about climate and gender can be doing to drive greater impact in both of these arenas, and to drive impact in them simultaneously.

If you care about making finance work for women, you probably know Women’s World Banking. I recently attended Women’s World Banking’s Making Finance Work for Women Summit in Singapore, where I spoke on their plenary on gender-smart investing.