A friend of mine is on the board of a large institutional investor, using her voice around the board table as a champion for gender equality.

In her role, she has consistently pushed for ambitious and specific objectives, and recently it paid off: in the form of a concrete commitment that a significant proportion of annual investments will have an explicit gender lens. It wouldn’t have happened without her hard work and bold advocacy, the support of fellow board members and senior management, and the consistent efforts of a lot of other people in that organisation. But her attitude was, we simply cannot stop with aspirational statements of intent; we need to ground those aspirations with tangible and measurable targets.

This post is co-authored by Suzanne Biegel and Carey Bohjanen

A lot of people we’re talking to are feeling tired right now: from COVID, endless uncertainty, lack of decisive action in the climate talks, or working their hearts out in a seemingly intractable environment.

In the gender-smart investing space, we’re starting to move out of the imaginative, optimistic, inspirational phase, and into the phase where we have to make our ideas a reality. Some of us are working in institutions that haven’t bought in yet, which can be exhausting and soul-crushing. Others are out on the frontier building new funds and vehicles. They’re exhausted not from fighting seemingly immovable institutions, but from fighting to bring something new into the world, often with limited resources in highly competitive environments.

In 2019, at the age of 54, my husband Daniel was diagnosed as autistic.

Daniel has been autistic his whole life, but until that point, he had assumed that everyone experienced the world the same way he did: from the intensity of sensory stimuli like sound, to frustrations with communication. He just thought they were more okay with it than he was. The diagnosis helped him realise that his experience of the world was in fact different to other people’s - and all the ways that the world wasn’t built to meet the needs of people like him.

A lot of people assume that investing with a gender lens means investing in the companies that already “get it”: companies with a female founder or strong representation of women in leadership, companies serving women customers or creating products and services that address entrenched gender roles, or companies that are already addressing gender imbalances in their employment, marketing, and supply chains.

But gender lens investors also have an important role to play in helping companies that aren’t there yet on gender to transition and improve. For one, there are a lot more of them out there - and if we really want to change the way that business is done, we need every company to do better on gender equity. Yes, we need to direct capital to the companies that are excelling on gender equality and creating transformative change. But if we want to create a more just and equal world, we have to work with the ones that don’t yet “get it” too.

For a long time, I’ve been talking about the need for investors to better take into account a company’s marketing and advertising practices when it comes to how we analyse its performance on gender equity.

Gender lens investors already incorporate diverse factors such as leadership, governance, employment, and supply chains into our due diligence. And businesses are increasingly paying attention to the role their advertising practices can play in challenging - or reinforcing - harmful gender stereotypes (see the Unstereotype Alliance for one example of this work).

If you want to invest in gender equality, one of the smartest - and most overlooked - things you can do is to pay attention to where men and boys are in the picture.

One of the biggest blocks to gender equality around the world is the persistence of insidious gender norms: shaping everything from who is assumed to be responsible for care work in the home, to who occupies positions of power in the workplace and community, to how safe it is for women to catch public transport, walk down the street, or share domestic space with their spouses or family members. Changing these norms means changing the assumptions and behaviour of men.

In August, Pitchbook reported that 2021 has so far been a surprisingly standout year for women entrepreneurs, with US venture-backed companies with a female founder or co-founder taking in $25.12B in investment in the first half of the year - more than the total amount raised in any prior year.

But there was a catch. The companies that received the majority of that investment were those with mixed-gender male and female co-founding teams. The share of capital raised by women-only founder teams is in fact smaller than it was last year. And to no one’s surprise, the share of total capital raised by either group was dwarfed by the amount of capital raised by male founders, who have received 83% of all deal dollars so far this year.

Over the last five years, the size of the global ESG market has almost doubled, reaching a total of $40.5 trillion in 2020.

Gender lens investing has grown significantly as well in the same period, with the number of private markets vehicles growing from 50 to more than 200 since 2017, and public markets investment to $11B at the end of 2020, following a $2.9B investment from Japanese pension fund GPIF into Morningstar’s Gender Diversity Index.

While significant, these numbers are still a drop in the ocean compared to the mammoth size and reach of ESG investments, which Bloomberg estimates may comprise a third of global assets under management by 2025.

As the gender lens investing field grows in size and profile, one question I get asked a lot is how to separate the funds that are investing with a broad gender lens, from the funds that are focused on transformative impact for women.

Most frequently, I hear this question from impact investors and philanthropists who want to use investment as a tool for women’s empowerment and wellbeing - be it in healthcare, education, or something else. But this focus on transformative impact is also increasingly in the vernacular of a broader range of investors.

The last few months have seen a suite of new books and resources from leading thinkers in the investment community that either touch upon or more deeply examine gender-smart investing. This explosion of gender-smart literature speaks to both a growing interest in women’s financial empowerment, and a hunger amongst investors - men and women - more generally for information about moving their money is smart and in a way that aligns with their values.

These books all tackle gender-smart investing from different perspectives, and are great resources to share with your friends, colleagues, clients, to deepen your own thinking, or to start you on your gender-smart investment journey.

Read on to learn more about these fantastic new resources and their authors, and choose one - or more - to grace your bookshelf.