 I am going to start with Rihanna, Rihanna Nathu. Rihanna is the founder and CEO of Spectrum Impact, a strategy consulting firm that supports a range of organizations looking to expand their impact investment footprint. Rihanna has held numerous leadership roles in this space, the impact investing program at the Case Foundation, Bank of New York, Melan's social finance program, Rockefeller Foundation, and UN Capital Development Fund work as well. And Rihanna is an adjunct assistant professor within Georgetown University's Global Development Program, Teaching Impact Investing, Social Finance in Emerging Markets, and we are honored to have you here today. Okay, and next we have Rachel Robichotti. There we go. Rachel is the CEO and founder of Adesina Social Capital It's an investment firm that serves as a critical bridge between the social justice movement and financial movements. We love that. Rachel is a leader in the financial industry and she's known for integrating social justice criteria into investment portfolios, working tirelessly and consciously at the intersection of racial, gender, economic, and climate justice. She's also the co-creator of Due Diligence 2.0, which is an organization that is trying to transform the way the industry supports asset managers, particularly asset managers who are people of color. Rachel's passion for social justice is rooted in her background as a black queer woman growing up in a community that struggled for safety and financial security in a town that was largely segregated and we're happy to have her voice on the panel today. NECA is our next panelist. NECA is a managing partner and general partner at Vested World. It's an African focused venture capital firm investing in agriculture and consumer goods and also specifically investing in early stage companies and technology startups in East and West Africa. I think you guys are up to 32 companies to date, which is wonderful. NECA has a deep well of experience and knowledge in African consumers in both rural and urban areas and she's been working thoughtfully on the continent for I think close to 14 years maybe now. NECA has led transactions in creative industries, B2B, retail tech, fintech, health tech, mobility, and logistics. She's rooted in a frame of reference for black feminism and brings an understanding of race and class and gender when it comes to capital and economic growth and we're happy to have you here. So these are our wonderful panelists and I think when it comes to gender lens investing, I'd like to set the stage by us defining that. And so the first question I have is, how do you define gender lens investing? And I'd like each of our panelists to take that. How do you define it and how does it show up in the work that you do? Hi everyone, so nice to be here. Thank you Ashley for organizing this conversation. So as you sort of mentioned in the introduction, my firm specifically works with allocators. So we focus on investors who are deploying capital, have market rate expectations, are impact interested and completely confused. That's our sweet spot. The more confused you are, the happier we are because it means we get to start at the beginning. We get to throw out all of the misconceptions and preconceived notions that we all bring to this space and start with data, which Rachel will talk a lot about because her firm does an incredibly thoughtful data forward approach to investing. But we start with data, we start with performance, and we start with objective and impact. And so in that sort of idea of education and moving together, which is very much a firm principle, we talk a lot about gender or racial equity or really any impact theme as a way of thinking about your risk and opportunity holistically. And we use that language because for so many folks that are new to this space, the moral imperative, even though it's how we are designed, is unbelievably frightening. And it can actually be very segregating in a way. So someone sort of walks in and says, well if I'm not doing this already, what have you decided about whether I care about women or girls or non-binary people? And so we come at it the other way and we start with the risk imperative. And so for us, gender lens investing is, how are you thinking about half of the population, half of the labor force, and half of the best ideas in the world? Are you looking for them? Are you thinking about them? Are you accounting for them? Are you missing them? And so for us, gender lens investing comes into the investment discovery process. Where do women and girls live and where do women and girls as customers, consumers, and investors? So we take a very operations focused, given what we do. So at Atacina Social Capital, we're a public markets impact asset manager and we specialize in social justice investing. What that actually means is that we partner with social justice movements to understand what impact means. There's a lot of folks in finance talking to each other about data we already have in order to impact the issues. Here's some last because it's so true. And what we do is listen to the community that we intend to impact. So during the Me Too movement, we went to the gender justice community and said, what is it that you would have us do? So for us, the definition is getting out of our own finance box and talking to those who are impacted. They said, we talked to the National Women's Law Center, we talked to women's foundations across the country and survivor groups of workplace sexual harassment and they told us, can you get rid of forced arbitration for sexual harassment? There wasn't any data available at that point about which companies had these policies in place that would shelter the company and the perpetrator, silence the victim, allow this serial sexual harassment to continue. The trouble with the way that public markets and finance were approaching it before that point is that again, looking around data, looking around with data that we already have, a lot of Gender Lens portfolios were being created based on women on boards. Extremely important. At Addicina we believe that safe and inclusive workplaces in society are absolutely necessary for women and gender expansive people and the issue that was being presented and what we were asked to do was to put an end to a practice that was enabling serial sexual harassment. So that's what we focused on and when we didn't have the data we went out and created it in partnership with social justice organizations. So there's about 3600 publicly traded companies that are listed in the United States where this would apply and we built a database that was public that would show the status of a company and where it stood on this policy. So for us the definition is really rooted in what does the gender justice community, those organizations that are led by and doing work on behalf of women and gender expansive people, what is it that they need us to do? So it's kind of a constantly evolving definition. Hi everyone, thanks so much everyone for the reflections. We invest in the private side of things and one of the things that I noted when I joined Vested World a few years ago was that our portfolio did have a number of female founders in it you know we're investing in Africa most of the female founders were foreign and I said this could be a challenge or problem or want to understand how we got here and we had to really look internally and reflect on why that was and what it really meant to invest with a more intersectional lens even as we invest on the continent but I think maybe the founding of Vested World is also really important so our founder Euler Maiko GP was born and raised in Liberia and moved to the US as a refugee in the early 90s during the Civil War. I think for him there was this question about what does this mean to have now great access to opportunity that many people back home don't have and how might he address this opportunity gap over the course of his career and he ended up spending time in Asia and was very inspired by the growth trajectory that he saw there and that's really what formed the foundation of our thesis which is that we need to invest really to create the next East Asia in Africa that our metrics which are very important to the way East Asia was about 30-40 years ago could improve by investing in a range of sectors to drive inclusive jobs and inclusive job growth and you can't do that without investing in women it's been really clearly shown on the continent that women are really the job creators because they are the primary entrepreneurs SMEs are the primary creators of jobs on the continent and so if you have a strategy that's focused and that doesn't take that into account you're really not going to lead to job growth and there's been a lot of research around what does gender lens investing mean in the private markets and many of you will be aware of the 2x challenge and some of the metrics and work that they've done there and there's a broader set of things but I'd say number one that we try and look at is do you have female founders in the group of founders yes or no you obviously want to look at the supply chain and the customers that are being actually served but one of the things we said was that we know that companies that have female founders are more likely to I'd say address some of the challenges that we see in the broader sector that might be around sexual harassment policies or family leave policies or otherwise and so that's one of the metrics that we really track but earlier this year we said is that enough to just have a female founder or does the power structure actually make sense and by that I mean one of our portfolio companies has four founders and one founder has about 45% share there is a female founder she has about 15% another founder has 15% so while her share is similar to the other non-majority male founder or almost majority male founder should we count that as a yes or not and so we've recently started to define this as what's the actual percent equity ownership as a female founder that you have in the company and then we count that share as a yes so in that case it's 15% yes and then in another case that's a solo female founded company that would be 100% yes I think getting deeper into this it's really the question who's making decisions in a company and who's being served and how are they being served how are employees being treated in an organization and how are they growing in that organization and then how are you operating sort of with the broader community so there's a few sets of areas you can try and look at it's not so easy but I think there's metrics and then there's what you're really trying to get at when you look at gender lens investing okay thank you I appreciate all those perspectives one of the things that from what you just said Neko you were talking about the importance of sort of investing in these companies and how that can help with job creation I wonder if you can speak to you know why this particular lens is important like what would happen in the absence of not prioritizing it and not thinking about it do you have another example that you might be able to share with us yeah definitely I think one of the questions is where is capital actually flowing and why or why is it not flowing there and just some context in Africa female only founded teams are getting 2.2% or less of venture capital dollars if you have blended male female founded team they're getting about 17% of venture capital dollars what that means is less than 20% of VC in Africa is going to women as I mentioned women are the key entrepreneurs at all levels in my view so there's a pretty big gap I think what it ends up meaning is that broadly the investing ecosystem is biased in a lot of ways and is leaving ROI for our investors on the table by not investing in women we've seen this show up as we like to lead rounds there is a company we invested in called shuttlers it was a bootstrapped female founded company and the perspective from some VCs was that this is not venture scalable and whether it was that they couldn't see what we saw or that they really liked this other very loud company you know that had raised quite a bit of money but had much less traction I'm not sure but that company shuttlers grew 26x over a period of 18 months in terms of the number of routes and raised a pre-series A round earlier this year and I think it is really about leaving money on the table it's about undervaluing and misjudging women and it's really about saying that we shouldn't invest in women sort of the view that I was getting from some of this oh is it venture scalable meaning maybe the founder isn't the one that should be getting this capital they've created hundreds of jobs in the mobility space in Nigeria and through their bus partners are moving 9,000 people per day in Nigeria and I think the impact they're having is not just on the jobs but also on the fact that women are safer taking this transport than they are in public transportation and there are many other impacts that sort of ripple from that yeah thank you Rachel are you seeing anything specific in this space especially when it comes to intersectionality and like the social justice frameworks like you know what do you think would happen in the absence of putting that kind of lens toward investment is it on yes okay so in public markets we've done a great job of having capital flow seamlessly but it's become relatively disconnected from the impacts of that capital so I believe that it's on the private side it is absolutely imperative to invest in women and invest in solutions that are supportive of women and gender expansive people on the public market side what we're more at risk of if you're looking at the business case is the headline risk or the you know you're the company that had a serial sexual harassment you know set of claims you're also looking at the ability to retain talent when forced arbitration for sexual harassment existed we were looking at multiple studies showing that where the policies existed they were really having trouble retaining talent over time which is becoming increasingly important in a tight job market so there's a business case for it from a social justice perspective one of the reasons we chose to focus on this issue is because forced arbitration disproportionately impacted low wage workers women and African-American workers in the United States so we could actually from an intersectional perspective get a lot of impact for focusing on this particular issue thank you that's really important I don't know if Rahana you have an example that might be separate from that but I'm hearing you know money's being left on the table people can be you know kind of sidelined is there anything else you might want to add yeah I think both Nica and Rachel really perfectly articulated the defensive I'm simplifying over simplifying but the defensive and offensive opportunities of gender lens investing and there are plenty I think the third thing that we see in our client base which as I mentioned is investors predominantly is really just this idea about business model continuity also so there is something that has happened particularly historically in the United States where we have we moved from a traditional philosophy of workers as value adders to a cost center and we changed what it means to be an employer and employee there's not a company on the planet that does not require either natural resources or labor to fuel the bottom line we are on the precipice of AI and technology so maybe I'm not saying that next year but currently you need one of those two things to have a really great year and so thinking about your workers as a stakeholder in the process is a thing that we've lost I think with the current system that we operate in so I would say in addition to those wonderful examples to me there's some serious business model risk Rachel talked about retention turnover costs are astronomical in this country and it's kind of amazing what you could do if you provided childcare or if you simply provided more than four weeks of unpaid your job is kind of cool protection when you're walking out the door it's just amazing that those feel superfluous when they are directly relevant to the success of a business so for some of our clients I think in addition to what has been shared which is exactly right there is this very sort of like new way of thinking about who is actually adding to the business who's creating value for you and then how are you creating value for them thank you that's a really great perspective the next thing is that we're talking about you know why this kind of lens is important what's at risk if we don't prioritize this but you guys know from any perspective whenever you're giving or receiving money you're going to draw critique and you're going to draw criticism if you're on the side of being the person who's receiving the funding being on the side of the person who's allocated the funding and I wonder if you can speak to some of the challenge to respond to skepticism in this space direct critique in this space and feel free to share you know a general view or a specific example if you have have something and this is for all the panelists so you know just pop corn and pop in so we had many people when Addicina started we had many people say it's not possible to drive impact in public markets and what we were able to show this was our proof of concept we work on issues beyond the gender forward issues as well but this was our proof of concept we were central to ending forced arbitration for sexual harassment in this country last year by building investor support by publishing a database and when we started there were less than 20 companies that had publicly ended the practice when we ended there were 396 companies that represented 10 million workers we padded ourselves on the back we felt pretty good about that thought that was good impact but then we were winding down because legislation was coming forward and we began to consult at the highest levels of policy making on what would ultimately become a bill that would one of the few bipartisan bills that would pass to end forced arbitration for sexual harassment in the country so a lot of our naysayers were just like this isn't possible in public markets and what we said was there's power behind data there's power in working in communities so extending our impact well beyond our own portfolio to mobilize other investors that's our approach to impact so it was for us it was really more like a disbelief that impact was possible in public markets and it absolutely is if you're looking beyond your own portfolio I would also say and I feel very sensitively about this as well I do have people that say how can you be invested in public markets at all and I can have one foot very clearly in our vision of a regenerative future but I also have to have the other foot squarely in the present money is power in this world and in this country and most of it most of our collective resources are in public markets someone has to do what's necessary to put those collective resources toward solving our biggest problems and that's what we're up to I would just say it's an ongoing debate in the African VC and ecosystem you get a lot of pushback I think you can just check any of search my name on Twitter and gender or alohoomame from first check capital and just see the various responses is what I would say I try not to engage too much on Twitter so maybe every other month I'll put something out there but I think the biggest critique if you will is that oh there's not enough female founders to invest in in Africa and it's an interesting vicious cycle because of that 20% or so of capital that's going to female founders meaning male female founding teams or female only almost 80% of that is at the seed and pre-seed and so you can imagine that to then get to a series A is quite challenging and there's a huge drop off that's happening I think there is this challenge around actually making bets that are bigger bets than a 50k check so who's getting the tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars so I think that's probably the biggest critique if you will I think the other one is that and the data is starting to come now there's a few great data sources for African VC but that we're still relatively early in terms of venture capital which was founded in 2014 doing deal by deal investments and then the first fund was launched about five years ago most VC funds on the content were launched around 2013-2014 so we're just getting this first 10 year data and there's for now only one fund that's fully exited its first fund and so we're still relatively early my hope is that the data will continue what we know from every other market in the world that has this data which is that you are leaving money on the table by not investing in female founders by not investing in diverse management teams by not setting up boards of directors that have diversity on them by not looking at the supply chain by not looking at policy etc so I think people are allowed to be a little bit ignorant in the absence of data and my hope is that as we are building this practice on the continent the data will prove out as it literally has in every other market Rahana I wonder if you could also tap in a little bit maybe to kind of sometimes there's critique coming from traditional investors as well in terms of what it means to look at the quote unquote non-financial factors as a lens for investment and if you can also add to that it's a really important framing I think that the criticism around gender lens investing is not at all dissimilar to criticism around any values based judgment and I think it's a uniquely human experience to take a really complex thing and simplify it to obsolescence like we just can't handle we're not very good in the gray and so criticism around gender or climate or racial equity any of these impact themes they often lack materiality and materiality is an unbelievably unattractive conversation to have in any financial consideration because what it basically means is here's an asterix and nobody loves that and so we spend a lot of time reminding our clients that an investor that is looking at an Addicina product and an investor that's looking at a vested world product might be the same investor but what they have to consider material to that strategy is drastically different that gender in the public markets and gender in the private markets don't look the same that a founder led strategy in a continent that's particularly under invested is really strong and a founder led strategy in a market in a developed economy may not be that exciting and so being able to bring a material perspective to your work what's relevant for me in this market in this place in this asset class and with these constraints that is what we try and do with our investors and it it just adds complexity and so it gets really hard for an investor to say well here is our gender lens methodology because like any other impact theme it's not one methodology it's a different approach to every single asset class and so trying to build just a little patience and tolerance you know no traditional investor in the world takes the same approach to their entire portfolio so neither should we and trying to remind ourselves the patience and the grace and I think the comfortability with complexity that we need to actually get it done yeah I think that's powerful we live in the gray every day so you know we live in the gray with all of our issues and also just life in general I am curious I kind of just want to get a little sense of the room how many we have in here okay do we have any investors in the room okay people who would describe themselves as social entrepreneurs oh right wonderful okay so the reason I ask that is because I kind of want to take us to the point of I'm not going to say advice but I'm not going to say advice per say but like if someone wants to get started in this space you know I want to think about gender lens investing as a part of what I do as a part of conversations like just what would be your guide post would be one guide post that you could point someone toward whether that person is a social entrepreneur or a founder or an investor if you can give a thought I think it's really important to clarify what your goals are and the goal that is the least likely to offend is a goal centered on fairness so if you are on the investment committee of foundation that wants to move more in the direction of racial gender economic climate justice you can have this argument that says why aren't our fund managers reflecting the demographics of the country you know if the country is 51% women why aren't our managers reflecting that the reason it's easier is because that's a value that tends to be shared on the left and right is the value of fairness so I think that's one thing that you can do to like move the conversation forward another thing that can happen is ensuring that it's something that you're doing in community because you're best learning knowing what's coming up and what's on the cutting edge is going to be from the other people who are working in this space I want to invite anyone to our newsletter if you text the word justice to 55444 you can become part of the Addisina community follow what's happening we have some very exciting things that we're going to be doing related to data and trans rights very interesting what public markets investors can do but it's also a chance to be part of a community where there's co-learning happening I would say it's a long journey and so I shared we started at just looking at the portfolio founders I think there's an issue here on joining to how do we really think about the power dynamics in the data that we're collecting so I think just be ready for that journey and fully embrace it I think it's important to understand your own individual biases as you're going to lead the charge if you will but also start to understand them within the organization so I remember after some trainings around what this intersectional metrics might look like for our fund there was some reflection around oh it's going to be really challenging to look at both the return expectations and the gender and and it's just like okay do you want to invest to have the greatest returns or not and greatest impact and then I think there's another piece which is just take that time to reflect on the journey and share and bring others with you and make some challenging choices which might include your investing team and what's the makeup of that team two thirds of my investing team is women I think that was not the case two years ago and we've been very intentional on how we're thinking about hiring and why we're hiring in this way and it's not an easy journey by any means but share and be in community is a great idea from Rachel as well maybe I would just those are fantastic I would just add to that maybe I would just add to that I think it's a great opportunity to have a bigger part of the audience knowing yourself is more than just knowing what kind of change you want to see in the world and having a really good sense of your expectations will provide folks like these wonderful ladies an opportunity to really meet your needs and so we tell investors all the time if you don't have your investment comfort zone if you don't have 25 years to prove this concept that's okay we will find something where you have contributed to the cause in three to five years and so I think for investors there's this impression that you have to shoot for the moon to contribute at all to this movement and I just don't think that's what we've learned we've learned that in a lot of ways moving together in whatever way you're comfortable with moving together and so for the investors and the decision makers I think approaching this space it's okay to have fine bright lines about what kind of capital, what kind of movement what kind of places you can invest in and there will be a gender solution for you thank you I think that's all great advice so I wonder do we have any questions from the audience it might be a great time to take some does anyone have a question ooh it's a quiet room this means we covered all of the topics perfectly oh wait I think we have one there people who are sort of new to investing but really believe in all the principles that you talked about our product is our investment product is an exchange traded fund trades for about $17 per share the ticker symbol is JSTC one of the most important things that we did was democratize access to what we're doing so start with a global all cap very diversified exchange traded fund my suggestion maybe I would just add to that that this is going to sound superfluous it's not meant to be take a peek at what you've got there used to be I'm going to say like five or six years ago there was this movement for retail investors to start to lobby plant administrators so the vanguards, the fidelities, the swabs of the world and somehow magically convince them that we were all going to strike together and then in exchange you have to do ESG it was a dream and a goal and the industry is sort of disincentivized to allow that sort of collective action but what it did do was create a market imperative that people were not willing to stay with plant administrators that didn't at least have an ESG product now do you think the product is very good? no do you need to invest with folks like Adesina? yes so there are I think options out there but the looking, the just taking a peek and seeing what you have I think that there's incredible strength in that maybe it doesn't feel like an allocation to start but it's a great step along the journey I think I'll just add I think it's very powerful to have a group of friends in the space and we've seen a few examples where this can actually lead to pretty significant impacts I was sadly not involved in this but a wonderful former colleague was in West Africa the women's investment club was actually started at a women's day event about five years ago where there were maybe as many of us in a room saying hey let's talk about women and whatever and the women said let us put our money in and they were able to raise about three million dollars from these you know amazing Senegalese women in industry and they invested in public markets to start and then have actually launched an evergreen fund out of that so I think there can be some really impressive power by coming together even in the context that unfortunately women are not investing as much into public markets and perhaps asset owners will need to make a bigger change to actually have the impact we'd all like to see Thank you I think those were great questions Does anyone else have a question in the room? Yes Based on your experience whether there's a particular sector that you have found to be more open or amenable to gender lens investing and by that I mean climate change versus health versus other areas where either investors themselves have been able to more seamlessly recognize that there is a value in terms of a social return on investment as well as a financial return on investment I've been really encouraged and to see the overlap between racial and gender justice conversations that's happened in the past several years I think the Me Too movement and the racial justice reckoning in 2020 were both happened in relatively close proximity where investors started to see that social justice movements are giving us some early indicators of risk that we might not otherwise get signals for in that I believe there was a lot of intentionality in spaces thinking of gender smart which is now 2x and many different initiatives like the work of women of color and looking at the challenges at the intersection of racial and gender justice the more we do that I think the better off we are all going to be because we're looking to solve the problem of having valued some humans more than others and you can do that by race you can do that by gender you can do that by class and I think the more that we the more that we come together to reweave the fabric of our shared humanity and our investing the better off we'll be building on that and I would say all sectors have some potential for gender lens investing and so it really is a question of what are you actually looking to achieve with the investment and we're looking at what I call Africa soft power and within that you all probably know Afro beats you probably know Nollywood now with all these films coming out and unfortunately most of the production companies on the continent are actually not really getting significant revenue back to them so the largest music studio in Nigeria is probably about somewhere between 3 to 5 million dollars in annual revenue which is crazy given all you know Afro beats and so there's a question about how can you actually bring value back to the continent across music, fashion film, etc and many creative industry businesses are female led and female founded and so it's an area that I'm particularly excited about but I'm also incredibly excited about about B2B retail tech and Agri or financial services, financial technology so I think it's hard to say that there's going to be one sector and especially given what I mentioned the metrics around where investment is happening what could end up happening if you say okay we're going to only invest in female founders and creative is that you end up with 90% of fintech deals being male founded so I would say everything can be gender lens in a way like every sector has the potential to have a gender lens deal in it but doing that work to really understand the opportunities is important maybe I'll just underline something that NACA said which is that it is possible across all asset classes and sectors we've certainly found that with our clients, many clients will walk in and say we want to do gender lens investing so we know that it has to be in VC and we spend time with them to explain there's actually a way that gender is not an asset class so there is a way to have gender across the whole portfolio but if you can't then it can live in the investment process and it's not an or it's an and so for some of our clients they haven't had the opportunity to do really cool stuff in South America in waste and sanitation that predominantly impacts women they're not in the right type of capital and time horizon for that to happen but for the investments they're making in the rust belt in the United States they can start to ask questions about how many women are in your workforce what is the pay discrepancy between your highest compensated employee and your lowest are their genders the same are their genders different what do you do around sexual harassment a lot of the stuff that Nika and Rachel both work on so building it into the investment process it's less fun to talk about but I think that's actually where we've seen the highest impact it doesn't stop the dollars from flowing but it does start to remind people that gender is a choice you can make in the way you invest in what you invest in so I loved what you said about it being everywhere because I think it can be everywhere okay thank you I think that's a wonderful question to close on I just want to say that I have a few key takeaways and I hope you took away a few things as well one is that this is complex work but this is important work that the gender lens can be applied intersectionally and it should be and that also we can take a framework to be grounded in this work and expect that there might be critique but you can still do the investing and you can still push forward a lot of these mission driven work because it's important work for us to do