 Hi y'all feeling this morning, nice sunshine coming in, right? A little brighter in here. It's gonna be a good day. Over the last centuries, decades, months, years, we've seen an explosion of leadership from women calling for equal pay, equal representation, and the basic right to autonomy over their body. A critical factor in this progress has been the integration of feminist thought into the function of our economy, including the investment sector. And I'll keep my remarks brief so that we can have the privilege this morning of hearing directly from some of the women who were and remain pioneers in this work. Please welcome Joy Anderson from Criterion Ventures, Jackie Vanderbrug from Bank of America, and Suzanne Beagle from Catalysts at Large. Welcome to the stage. So thank you so much. Joy and Suzanne and I were talking and just said it is an amazing privilege to be here at SOCAP because the story and the birth of the field of gender-led investing is so inextricably linked with the SOCAP community. It is really your companies and your funds and your research that has built this field. So a lot of you could be up here on stage with us and we just want to honor and appreciate that as we tell a bit of the story. I feel like I just lost my mic. There we go. Okay. So we're going to give you a little bit of a kaleidoscope today. What we're going to do is do past, present, and future. That's all right. In terms of the gender lens investing field. And then we're also going to do wide and deep. And we have 25 minutes. So it's a little bit of a taste as that kaleidoscope moves around. The amazing thing is there's oh, I think 22 other sessions that are gender-based focused here. And all of you also know that you can bring gender into any SOCAP session. So this is just that beginning. Let's start though with the definition. I'm going to keep it there, right? Could we actually just take a moment for mics designed for women? That would be great. Not slipping on hair? I'm not sure what's going on here. All right. There we go. Okay. So just to ground us all though, because there can be a lot of confusion when we say gender lens investing, what we wanted to do was to give you a sense of a high level definition, right? So gender lens investing is the intentional integration of gender-based factors into investment analysis with two goals. One sometimes higher than the other, sometimes equal, either improving risk adjusted returns or improving gender equality. And I think all of us believe that you get one leads to the other. So that's that definition. I'm going to go into two quick stories in terms of the past. The first actually starts after there was a set of pioneers who were working to get capital to women entrepreneurs who were working in community investing and microfinance in women in the way that they do development. And it was still pretty silent. And Joy and I were raising the good capital fund. This was about 2007. And we were sitting in a hotel in New York City, and we were looking at a list of LPs. And we had this moment of realization that remarkably almost all of the names on the list were men. And I don't know, Joy, I remember looking at you. Do you remember that moment? Yep. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think part of it is it shifted then to say in the rays for good capital, how do we have conversations with, we knew a bunch of women philanthropists, so went to talk to them, people like Barbara Dobkin, who was one of the earlier investors in good capital. And in talking to these women, we get started to get asked some really hard questions like, cool, that might be interesting, but what is the deeper gender impact that can actually be created from this? Why would it matter if I invested in your fund? And we couldn't answer those questions. I remember that part too. I remember that really clearly that, there was a sense that we had questions that didn't have answers. And that started a whole set of research that we did around what would it look like to integrate gender into an investment thesis. We should call out that at that point there were some real leaders. So folks like Calvert Foundation, now Calvert Impact Capital, really took that on and said, what would it look like to have a gender lens on our social impact notes? And Root Capital said, well, we believe that women are leaders in agriculture, but what would it look like to really have a scorecard in terms of how our lending is changing women's lives? Just to add to that, the other thing we started learning from both Calvert and Root was what was the organizational work required to make this change? Because it wasn't a flip a switch and we'll pay attention to gender. It was some serious hard work inside of the leadership of those companies, those investment funds, to say, what would this really mean in terms of our operations? And there were some amazing leaders who guided that. Right. This aspect that, well, you can't just launch a product and not look internally in terms of how you operate in launching that product, that that's a synergistic conversation and evolution. The other thing that I remember about that time was we actually called this work that the initiative Women Effect Investments. So that was the initial title. And as we were working, more and more we realized that, yes, it was about women's empowerment, but it really was about gender systems. Right. It really was about looking at that aspect of how is it that our systems are constructed in a way that has some bias that we may or may not see. And figuring out, I think that was one of the things I'm most proud of of the work that we all did together of making sure that the conversation, and I'll talk later about what this means for the future, but we fought hard to make sure that the conversation was about gender, not about women. And recently somebody said the assumption is because of how privilege operates, if we say gender, we must meet women because men are the norm. And gender is about both men and women and making sure that it was big about, and all genders, right. So figuring out how do we expand that picture. And recognizing as well that there are many people who come to this and had been coming to this for a long time from a women's lens, invest in women entrepreneurs, invest in products and services that positively impact women, and that this, for some people, that is absolutely the frame that they come to. No, absolutely. So I want to take one other story though in the past. And I want to get you a slide. Oh, here we are in the past. Okay. There's the slide. So I want to bring you back to 2008 at this conference. How many people were here in 2008? View of you. All right. So if you can remember, in 2008, the third day was open space. Remember, everybody got in a line and you said, I want to talk about this. And if enough people voted for your session, you got a session and you set up. So we had a session, an open space session on gender lens investing where we had about 30 people out on a really hot sidewalk talking about what this might look like. And that led to 2009 where we had a session in one of these rooms that was people hanging off the rafters. And this Venn diagram, which was the early Venn diagram to say, what are some of the lenses that are most commonly used in gender lens investing? What are some of the ways in which this is done? Getting access to capital for women entrepreneurs, looking across an entire value chain from the board through the supply chain in terms of workplace equality. And what the company actually does, products and services, if this company is wildly successful, will it enhance gender equality in its given geography or its given sector? This was drawn on the chalkboard here at Socap for the first time. And that session was actually voted like best people's choice session back when Socap had a people's choice award. So again, this was Socap being at the front of people coming from grassroots saying, we don't know how to do this yet, but we're going to work together to make that happen. We're going to work together to figure it out. And then there was the first champions event. So we just had 160 gender lens champions out in the tent. The first one was about 15 of us in the firehouse in the morning saying, how do we bring this up in sessions? How do we go into a session and start to say, how could gender and we literally took out the book and flip through the pages and said, gender relates here, gender relates here, gender relates here, how do we bring it up? The last piece that I want to do in terms of history and Socap in this movement actually is a bit of a thank you to Kevin and Rosalie because Kevin and Rosalie were the first people to put this subject main stage. And they did that intentionally in 2012. So in 2012, this was a main stage plenary to talk about how gender lens investing was essential to the field of impact investing. And this was the chart. So we worked really hard to say, what is the scope of the field of products and services at that time in terms of what the funds were? And these were the investable options that we had. And so it's grown. We also put this chart up. Okay, we also put this chart up. And this was the realization that again, I think Socap has played out so well that yes, it is about products and services, it is about funds, but it's also about the ecosystem. So in 2009, 2012, we were saying we need education, we need investor groups, we need pilots, we need metrics. And then we sort of had this vision, maybe slightly aggressive, that by 2014 everybody would go, oh yeah, that's what it is. So that was potentially aggressive. But on the other hand, I feel like it was predictive of where we are going to be now. And that's actually what we're going to hand it to the present shortly. But I'll say our path there was to understand the big 10. And the three of us were laughing at the fact that a lot of this work has been done at the tent of Socap. Which had heaters today. But that the realization that this work is both those who are designing from significant social challenges like gender based violence, and those who are adding a gender factor to a particular type of capital, say a large cap ETF, and everything in between. So it was that realization that to go from that small map that we had at the beginning to a much larger map, we needed the full spectrum, and we needed all of the systems and ecosystems in between. With that, I'm going to hand it to Suzanne, who's going to do a little bit of the present. Thank you, Jackie. So I'm delighted to talk about the present. And one of the things about the present is how much this has gone mainstream. And how do we know that? Flying over here from London on United Airlines, that great bastion of social impact reporting, Hemisphere's Magazine, has an article about LA women, a former YWCA hotel is turned into a feminist art hub. So you've got to love this. When it opened in 1926 as a YWCA hotel, I'm going back to the past just for a minute here. With nine floors reserved exclusively for women, it was the largest real estate project ever financed and operated primarily by women. So we talk about this as if it's our past 10 years, but we stand so much on the shoulders of so many people who have come for us, and I think we remind ourselves of that every day. By the way, three pages later, because you just have to keep reading the magazine, Common Thread, a company run by two guys, founded by two guys, known supply is all about having people know where their clothes are from. And inside every label of the garment is the woman who made the clothes. And I know that many people in the SoCAP community are so much about this. And it's just a reinforcement that this isn't a fringe thing, it's not a side thing. And that it's about men and women working for gender equality and that the products and services and the supply chains and the entrepreneurs are both men and women who are making this happen. So that's part of the present. So it's a global community. We just had people from at least 40 countries with us. Money is moving. It's moving in differentiated vehicles from public equities to private equity, venture capital, private debt, alternative finance, it's across the spectrum. There are changing set of faces, new partnerships. It is vibrant. And yet it is still, still nascent. So before I get into the numbers, because I'm a numbers person, I wanted to stop for a second also and talk about why. Why is this moment now so important? And who are we as investors in what's going on in society and business today in all the talk of billions to trillions and how much capital is moving and what flavors of capital is moving. I just want to speak for one moment to the emotion that is not only in the United States right now, but around the world about what is going on for women, what is going on for humanity, climate change. Joy is going to talk about gender-based violence, which is what's going on. And how important this moment is for us to think about all of the work that we're doing as a community to use business as a positive force for social change, to use finance as a tool for social change. Okay, now I'm going to get deep into the numbers quickly. So let's do a quick scan. And I'm going to take you on a very quick world tour and maybe you can help me get to the first slide. So in the public markets, which is really where most of the capital sits, I get to do work with people like Wharton Business School, Wharton Social Impact Initiative, Varis Wealth Partners, and others scanning the field around the research. And Varis is going to come out next week with their fifth report on the state of the field from a public equities, public debt, and now gender bond standpoint. And they've been together, we've been tracking the field since the beginning. When I started investing this way 18 years ago, there was one fund that I could be in. And now I'm not going to do a big reveal about next week's number, but let's just say it's grown significantly from the 22 strategies last year to a much bigger number this year on a global basis. In ETFs, ETNs, mutual funds, separately managed accounts, you can invest from $20 all the way to, you know, millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars in these strategies. And there are kind of two flavors that we think about. One is this scan specifically talks about funds and vehicles that have a gender lens mandate. So they are explicit, they're branded, and they look at things like leadership governance, policies and practices that positively affect women and girls, and policies that are turned out once you do things that are good for women, turns out to be good for everybody. And that is one category. And last year, it was about $900 million that had moved into these 22 strategies. But there's a totally different way to look at this, which is what US SIF started asking US Social Investment Forum. There are members in 2016, how many of you, all the big asset owners, asset managers, fund managers, use gender as a factor of analysis in your investments? And that number was $132 billion in money market assets and $397 billion in institutional assets. So it's at the big numbers, at the small number, it's both numbers. And I can say that for some of those managers, the Trilliams and Boston Commons are June a capital Walden, they are so actively engaged in the boardroom, they are so actively looking at gender as a factor of analysis that you can decide, do I want to be in a branded focus strategy or do I want something that is as part of everything else that's going on? So I think that's important to really think about. So let's switch gears and we'll talk about the private markets. And you're going to help me out here. So maybe before I go there, we talked about products and services. We've talked about supply chains. The challenge with public markets is that what you can get easily with the data right now is about leadership and governance and something about policies and practices. It's harder right now to get all the way through supply chains. It's harder to get through and really do a product analysis. And so I think that's one of the next frontiers that we really need to go towards. And there are existing players like MSCI and Bloomberg that are capturing the data. There are new entrants like EqualEEP who for the last two years have been trying to go much, much deeper. And I think that is one of the ways that we shift the system. Okay. So now we'll switch gears and talk about private equity, venture capital and private debt. So we're in social impact initiative. I've been working with them for two years to take what was on that original slide, that little matrix, and say how do we really create the database of funds and vehicles around the world. And so last year we reported about 58 funds that had raised $1.3 billion in capital. This year our new report's coming out next week. Again, I'm not going to tell you the absolute numbers, but I can tell you it's dramatically increased. And what's exciting to me is the variety from FemTech to DeepTech, from sustainable ag to sustainable fashion, from energy and environment. We heard about an amazing woman this morning. What was she saying? Electrifying. Feminist electrification. In fact, electrification. Feminist electrification, which you got to really find out about. And this is both Black, White and Brown founders, venture capitalists, fund managers. This is about not only women, this is about intersectionality. And I know you're going to talk more about that. But people that are building this movement, who are creating these funds, who are creating these vehicles, who are seeing the power of where the market opportunity are coming from all corners and doing remarkable things. And so stop there for a second. Now let's talk about big sort of initiatives, collaborations. One of the things we want to talk about and where is the field today is where's the infrastructure, where are the collaborations, where are the networks that are happening that are really bringing this forward. Because it's important to have the vehicles, but then it's also really important to have the players who can and the relationships and the trust to make this happen. And to also have people really think about what's the purpose to stop and say, what is the purpose of all this capital? Where is it moving? And whether that is somebody who's a philanthropist, that development finance institution, a public sector actor, for each player to be able to say, what am I in this for? Who am I in this picture? So we talked this morning about the fact that the G7 development finance institutions have made a commitment called the 2X Challenge, which is to move $3 billion of capital by 2020 with a gender lens with a both impact agenda, development impact agenda, and a financial return objective. There's a collaborative between 15 development finance institutions that has come together, like so many other investor collaboratives, philanthropy collaboratives, institutional investor collaboratives, DFI's academic collaboratives that are coming together to say, how do we move further, faster, smarter as a community? And that I think is really exciting. At the World Bank meetings in Bali two weeks ago, there was an announcement about a billion-dollar fund for women, which is partway raised already. So it's really important that we talk about the beautiful examples that are the first $5 million or $10 million fund, but it's also really important that we talk about how we're moving institutional capital at scale. And then I want to ask you about what's the role of women's wealth in all of this? So just I think that piece of saying development financial institutions and other institutional investors moving at scale, but also we know that individual women investors have an aspiration to be impact investors. And many of us have seen that their sense of how they want to invest and what they're actually doing, there's a gap there. So there's been a lot of initiatives over time. We wanted to highlight one that's launching at Socap. Ellen Remmer, raise your hand. She's part of a coalition of folks doing invest for better. And the idea is let's show the stories of women who are impact investors. Let's give them tools so that they can move forward. And then let's connect them in groups so that they can learn and encourage each other, investforbetter.org. Okay, so if you could switch back to my other slides. So one last thing I want to talk about. So I've been working on this crazy project, which is a systems map. We're mapping the system of finance from a gender perspective. And we're all invited to play because you're all up here on the map. And it's just to show, and I'm obviously not going to take you through this, the richness of the layers of public sector, private sector, academia, the consulting firms, the financial structuring intermediaries, the readings houses, the media, the role of culture in this and language, all of the different facets where we can say investors plus capital plus vehicles, investing into companies really matters. But what our relationships are in this map, and how we want to shift the system, if we don't know what the system looks like when we're starting, how do we shift the system? So that is a perfect shift to Joy who's going to talk about the future. I love that big future blue. It's a remarkable number. So thrilled to be here. This is so much fun. But I do think part of what we're focused on at Criterion is making sure that as we continue to shape the field of gender lens investing, that we're making sure we're not underwhelming the opportunity. We say pretty often, this is actually a moment. This is a moment where gender lens investing is expanding in all kinds of remarkable ways, getting all kinds of attention, and we got to do it right. So to the next slide, there's one of the key things that I want us to focus on is if we don't make the field of gender lens investing more intersectional. It will fail as a movement. It will fail in its impact. And it's one of those pieces that's just at the edge of, and it's almost everything that's happened in women's movements over time is a tend towards privilege, right? It is an ongoing challenge of what has happened in women's movements to focus on women of privilege. And a certain race, certain color, a certain approach, a certain position. And if we don't fix that, it's not going to work. And so one of the ways to think about this is this slide of thinking about how do we frame questions of gender as about power, not just identity? Because this isn't about women. This is about structures of power. This is about systemic structural inequities that don't work for lots of people. And so what a gender analysis where I think it's powerful is it's a lens to see where there's power, privilege, and bias operating. But if we're only looking at that through gender, we will fail to understand what gender really means, and we will also fail to understand what it means to be a woman, which isn't a single experience. Like, I want us to stop saying women don't take risks. What a ridiculous statement. All women? Anywhere? What about childbirth for the love of God? There's just so many ways in which thinking about who we're investing in, where we're investing, so this is the second piece is, so first of all, thinking about it, framing it. I want us to shift a little bit from thinking about identity to thinking about power, and then the second piece is any gender analysis needs to be specific, and this is where I think it makes us better investors, because it's not just, oh look, I found a woman. It's right. In this particular supply chain, what are the risks of the power dynamics in trading sexual favors for participation in the supply chain? That is a complex system. That needs to be analysis. I was talking to an investor the other day who said 70% of the people in my supply chain are women, therefore my product helps women. Like, not good enough. What does that look like? What are the power dynamics in the supply chain? How is that playing out? So making sure that we ground our analysis in a very specific context, and I don't know, maybe I need to have this slogan of eradicate essentialism. Are you with me on that? Like bumper stickers? Eradicate essentialism? There isn't a single essential identity of what it means to be a woman that we can somehow proclaim from the rafters. It is a diverse, complex experience of power. So we need to go broader, we need to go deeper, and then we need to go long. We have this challenge that we think about gender as static. It is changing, and I am beyond livid that our government in the United States has decided to eliminate, eliminate transsexual experiences as what defines you. You can choose, you can be all kinds of different things, and it isn't about our DNA. So thinking about the ways in which gender changes, what is the future of gender? Which leads me to this next point, which is if we're thinking about the future for the love of God, let's think about hope. Fundamentally, what I love about investing is that it's about the future. It's making a long-term bet. So think about these questions. As a philanthropist, how would you invest if you believed your philanthropy was working? As a government, if you believed that your development aid was working, if we were actually changing what communities could participate in the global economy, how would you invest differently now? And then this third one that comes so close to criterion's work on gender-based violence, how would we invest differently if we believed that it was possible to eradicate gender-based violence? I was told recently in a speech I was giving in Singapore, and the guy said, well, I don't know, thinking about betting on a future without gender-based violence, don't you think that's a little Pollyanna? I said, Elon Musk gets to say that we could live on the moon, and I think we shouldn't beat the crap out of women and transgender people. And I'm Pollyanna. So how do we actually figure out how we bet on the future? And so what are your hopes? What do you hope for as this moves forward? What are my hopes? Well, I'm producing a summit, Gender Smart Investing Summit, next week in London, 300 people coming together from 42 countries. And my hope that's going to be manifested there and it ties to my hope overall is that this becomes normalized, that this becomes something which is part of investing. It is just something that is obvious, not special, but that the specialness of what we all bring to it as humans and our own intent, our own who are we in this picture is as important as who are we aiming to help and that the voice of the people that we're doing this for is also front and center. I hope that we move from what has felt like this lens was noted as a limitation and still so often when we bring up a gender lens, it's seen as somehow limiting. It makes you go slower. It gives a smaller investment universe to this actually being seen as an accelerator because I'm sitting at a place like you, Joy, where it feels like we have a moment and so much needs to change and without the accelerator of a gender lens, I don't believe we're going to get there. So I believe we really need to start to understand this in that accelerating an essential element, okay, not essentialism, but it needs to be essential and owned by all by women and by men. And maybe essentialism doesn't actually accelerate the way we think, simplifying everything to just make it. Why can't we just talk about women on boards? It's so simple to understand. That's not the acceleration we need. So my hope is, again, to honor the amazing 160 people who showed up this morning for this breakfast because they are my hope. They are the people who are out every day fighting to figure out how to have this conversation matter and they're my hope. So thank you so much. Thank you all so much. Thank you guys.