 Three years ago at SoCAP, a conversation began which set forth a series of events that has changed my life. Joy Anderson and I were talking with Shari Barenback. Shari at the time was the head of the Calvert Foundation. We had finished the raise for good capital and Shari asked, so what's next? We told her about our interest in the intersection between gender and finance and investing. And about the increasing gulf we were seeing between the worlds of impact investing and the amazing networks of women philanthropists. And our question of if there was a vehicle that would be attractive to women philanthropists, a vehicle that would drive impact through a gender lens. And Shari said, we could do that. Many of you in this room know the deep details of this story and you have been my mentors and my colleagues on this journey of creating a field of impact investing. I wish I could call you all out by name. I wish I could see you. Thank you. This has not been easy and we are only beginning. Others of you are hearing gender lens investing for the first time and wondering maybe if it's relevant to you. I hope the next 10 minutes peak your interest and get you committed to asking some more questions and taking a step. Because I am increasingly convinced that a gender lens in investing is one of the biggest underexplored opportunities for driving social impact and that this conversation when taken seriously changes everything. So to be sure, I am far from alone in talking about women and gender and finance. There's a chorus of virtual cacophony of voices these days. Take Goldman Sachs. They say investing in women is the single best way to reduce inequality and drive economic growth. They actually have called it the virtuous cycle. Or the economists say forget India, forget China, forget the internet. Economic growth in the next decade will be led by women. Or the World Bank who puts it simply, gender equality is smart economics. These voices are undergird by a boat load of data. Perhaps you've seen this infographic at Made the Rounds about the differences in spending priorities between men and women. Women's incremental dollar of income, 80% of that goes to her family's education, health, nutrition versus a comparable 30 to 40% for men. But there's a lot of other data out there. FAO suggests that if women farmers had the same inputs as male farmers, their yields would increase 20 to 30% lifting 100 to 150 million people out of poverty. Ross Baer told me last night in village capitals data, women entrepreneurs are 12% more likely to be running profitable ventures, but are raising 50% less money. If you look at public companies, companies with three or more women on their boards have a 53% higher return on equity. Harvard Business Review just wrote about teams, the more women on the team, the better decisions that are made. Or go to Wall Street, where women fund managers are more likely to be running profitable ventures. Women fund managers have average yearly returns 50% higher than their male colleagues. Leading to that question of what would have happened if Lehman brothers had had more sisters. So whether you're talking about organizations that are looking for outsized financial returns, or you're talking about organizations that are driving global social impact, they're talking about a gender lens. Where we're talking about money and meaning. Where we're talking about impact and return. It's imperative that we're talking about a gender lens and that we're moving one forward. Let me step back and start with a question that I get asked often, which is what do you mean by a gender lens? First of all, a lens and not a screen. A lens is something that brings things into focus. If you put your glasses on, you see things that you would otherwise have missed. A gender lens is not about taking some things off the table. It's a viewfinder for opportunity. It's not about taking half the population off the table. And secondly, I actually mean multiple lenses, because investors like philanthropists have different interests, they have different expertise, and they have different theories of change. And so this is not one size fits all gender lens, but multiple gender lenses. I've seen three most commonly. You may find another one. First, access to capital. Because women entrepreneurs, whether they're micro entrepreneurs or high growth entrepreneurs, whether they're film directors in LA or fund managers in New York City have disproportionately less access to capital. Second, workplace equity. Thinking about how women's leadership and equal rights are valued from the board all the way through the supply chain. What are the policies? What are the practices? And how does that work inside the company? And finally, what is it that the company is actually doing? What's the product or service that it's delivering? And how might that have a disproportionate benefit to women and girls? We're not here talking about pink laptops. We're actually talking about innovations and maternal mortality, about services that get women to work safely, about access to good childcare in Mississippi, or to midwifery in San Francisco. So oftentimes when I talk about these lenses and this opportunity, I have investors stop and say, okay, you had me at hello. Where do I go? And that's where a chart like this is helpful, albeit not totally all knowing. Two things to notice about this map. One is that half of the vehicles on the map weren't here two years ago. We've had some amazing launches, and so now we have some great pioneers to learn from. The second is the diversity, because these vehicles cross gender lenses, they cross asset classes, they cross geographies. I wish I could tell you about all of them, but just a couple here. Illuminate Ventures, Cindy Patnos, Venture Capital Tech Fund. She decided she didn't want gender to be a barrier. And so she threw out the welcome mat to women. She said, I will take a meeting with a woman for every meeting I have with a man. I will stack my advisory council with the top women in tech. The result? Her venture fund is performing in the top quartile of her peers, and 40% of her founders are women, compared to 5% to 10% for an industry average. Or take Recapital's Women in Agriculture initiative, where they took a workplace equity lens and said, how is it that when we're investing in rural cooperatives, we can drive more women producers' increase in income? What are the commodities that we should be working in? And then beyond that, how is it that we can ensure worker safety when we know that as workers' income rises, women workers, domestic violence rises initially? What are the culturally appropriate domestic violence trainings that we can advocate for? Or finally, go to the other end of the spectrum. In the public markets, US Trust launching women's equality and economic security platform, where they're saying companies that are looking at women's leadership and women's rights are going to outperform their peers over the long haul. So while I'm really excited about that map, what it doesn't necessarily represent yet is a robust spectrum. Investors often say to me, Jackie, if you're serious about this belief that a gender lens drives impact and a gender lens drives return, then what are the opportunities across all the asset classes? What's going on in real estate? What's the opportunity in hedge funds? To get there, we have to go from two sides. So first, continuing to design for particular asset classes. Take the example of the Calvert Foundation in Win-Win. They started and said, we already have investments that are beneficial to women. But what if we reviewed our portfolio and said, how with discipline could we drive even more impact, even more return, and launched an amazing new vehicle? Or the example of partnership where you have the ISIS Fund emerging from the deep knowledge and conviction of women's world banking that women were being left behind as microfinance advanced and the global track record of Trinotos. Moving to the other side, though, we need to also be looking at the social challenges that are disproportionately challenging for women and girls. So take maternal health. Looking at the innovations from vaccines all the way through to clinical delivery and saying, what are the appropriate roles for finance in that? And how do we make sure we're moving those forward? But then also asking the question, if we know that access to family planning is a precursor to long-term country-level GDP growth, what would happen if that question was part of the analysis in sovereign bond ratings? What would happen at the country level if people knew that Moody's and S&P were asking questions about women's health? To be honest, however, a gender lens for me right now is actually bigger than any one social issue on an amazing vehicle. Because this is about a sea change. This is about the movement from when a gender lens is seen as too difficult, superlatives or perhaps just not economically viable to a place where a gender lens is seen as a normative and valued process and financial analysis and a common and powerful tool for social change. Think back 20 years ago. If you were talking to your financial advisor and you said how's my portfolio affecting the environment? They probably said well, we're not exactly sure it's a little difficult and complicated and the vehicles aren't really quite out there and you might have to give up some return. So if you asked your financial advisor today about the impact of your portfolio on women and girls or how you were leveraging their leadership, most likely with a few exceptions they would say the same thing. But then what happened? Sustainability was shown to be a competitive advantage and investors kept demanding. Gender diversity and women's leadership has been shown to be a competitive advantage. And let's talk about demand. Because women are inheriting 70% of the upcoming intergenerational wealth transfer and women advisors are more than 70% more interested in offering values based investing products to their clients. So, two things here. One is this is powerful social opportunity. The second is, this isn't baked yet. We're still figuring this out. We're learning the metrics, we're learning the examples, we're learning what works, we're creating relationships and so to that end there are 45 gender lens champions in this room. Would you all stand up? So take a look at these people. They are driving impact and return in their work through a gender lens and they would be more than happy to talk with you or to point you to another champion who might have the expertise you're looking for if you have questions about how this might relate to your world. They're going to be with us at the workshop this afternoon. We encourage you to come and join us. Because part of this is a personal choice. It crosses possibility and power and empathy. Do you know what the biggest change in pay equity in a company comes from? When a male CEO has his first daughter because none of us want to live in a world where our child is making 70 cents on the dollar or our child is subjected to the one in three odds of experiencing physical or sexual violence. And these statistics and these realities aren't going to change through philanthropy alone. Investors have to get in this game. We need to start using a gender lens together to create a world that works for all of us. Thank you.