Last month, Goldman Sachs made headlines with One Million Black Women, its impressive $10B investment commitment and $100M philanthropic commitment to support the advancement of Black women in the United States. The commitment was significant for both its size, its clear impact focus, and its impressive group of advisors, including gender-smart investor Melissa Bradley of 1863 Ventures.

This month, Goldman Sachs is making headlines for a very different reason: a resolution at its annual meeting on April 29, where shareholders will vote on whether the bank should do away with its mandatory arbitration policy.

The popular belief that women run economies differently than men do isn’t just based on gender stereotypes. Increasingly, as more women take the helm of our global financial institutions, there is evidence that it is grounded in reality.

In an article for Reuters this week, journalist Andrea Shal wrote about the impact that women leaders such as US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai are already having on the US economy - tying their influence to new policy initiatives such as the Biden administration’s $400B investment in the care economy, and focus on closing the racial wealth gap as a key part of its $2T infrastructure package.

This post is co-authored by Suzanne Biegel and Sophie Lambin

It’s difficult to be optimistic about climate change. A disaster in slow-motion, its effects are all around us, destroying lives, and disrupting whole ecosystems. And so, when governments, institutions and corporates talk about the green post-pandemic recovery – a new era of sustainability that will halt climate change in its tracks – we can forgive a degree of scepticism.

Climate investors have been carrying the banner for some decades now, and they are growing in number and in clout. In 2017 and 2018, annual tracked climate finance crossed the half-trillion dollar mark for the first time. On average, annual flows rose to $579 billion on average over the two-year period, a 25% increase from 2015-2016. In 2020, green bonds and other green-finance debt instruments crossed the cumulative $1 trillion mark since the Climate Bonds Initiative began tracking them in 2007. Green funds, once marginal in the investment landscape, are now mainstream.

The global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic (and later, the Black Lives Matter protests and reckoning) forced all of us to change our plans for the year: from the solutions we were building, to speed at which we were building them, to how we would release them into the world, to the questions we asked ourselves and each other about what “good” looks like when it comes to alpha, equity, and impact.

But the year also featured plentiful bright spots in the world of gender-smart investing….

As an impact-minded investor, you’re probably familiar with the green economy. But how much do you know about the blue economy?

Coined by Gunter Pauli in 2010, the term “blue economy” encompasses all sustainable economic activity related to the world’s oceans. But its five main pillars are aquaculture and sustainable fishing, renewable ocean energy, transportation and shipping, ocean health, and sustainable coastal tourism.

This post is co-authored by Suzanne Biegel and Joy Anderson for Impact Alpha

If material factors are those that would affect the judgment of an informed investor, gender is decidedly material.

The decline in women’s employment, for example, is expected to reduce global production by $1 trillion in 2020 alone.

The media conversation about gender lens investing often starts and ends with the question of how we can address the vast gender imbalance in VC and get more capital to women entrepreneurs.

But while investing in female founders can be powerful, if our end goal is to use finance and investment to help build a more equitable world - along the lines of gender, but also intersectionally with respect to race, ethnicity, sexuality, and disability - we need to look deeper than just the gender of the leaders we’re investing in, or the target markets of their products.

Like many groups of people working towards systemic change, the gender lens investing field can be divided into broad two camps: Disruptors and Shifters, or those who believe that the global finance system is so broken that it needs to be remade from the ground up, and those who believe that the best way to change the system is to work within it.

At the beginning of the northern hemisphere summer, as people took to the streets around the world for Black Lives Matter, my phone began to ring off the hook with investors wanting to know how they could invest more intentionally with an eye to both gender, and racial and ethnic diversity and equity.

Read on for six areas you should be paying attention to in developed markets if you want to invest for impact in this moment.