Gender lens investing is a field that is far more robust and complex than most people realize. Often gender considerations are reduced to a check-box exercise where investors count the number of women being served, women-led businesses being financed, or women sitting on boards. More ambitious gender lens investors may expand the scope of their analysis to consider issues such as pay equity, parental leave policy for workers, and forced arbitration.
Yet even the most ambitious gender-lens investors do not think much about the diverse range of factors that can affect gender equality and social inclusion across the globe, not just a given company, project, or industry. Most often this analysis is considered too complex and the gathering of high-quality, standardized data, far too onerous. That’s because the range of issues on a global scale is mind-bending and covers disparate areas such as financial inclusion, unpaid care work, land & property ownership rights, education & literacy rates, nutrition & food security, sexual & reproductive health rights, and the list goes on. In short, there isn’t an area of our global social fabric that gender equality doesn’t touch.
Enter today’s guest, Jessica Menon, who is solving this challenge as Founder & CEO of Equilo. Jessica is a gender equality and social inclusion (GESI) specialist with 20 years of experience conducting gender analyses, crafting gender action plans, managing organizational change management with a gender lens, and implementing systems-level change to advance GESI globally. She has experience working across development, humanitarian, finance, and private sectors in a wide range of industries. She also holds a Master of Public Policy from the Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
During this episode Jessica and I discuss Equilo’s work bringing together data, analytics, and tools to inform better gender-transformative decision-making across government, non-profits, and for-profit businesses. We discuss in detail two of Equilo’s tools, the GESI Contextual Analysis, and the Gender-Based Violence (GBV) Risk Score, the methodology underpinning them, the challenges around data collection and comparability, and some of the surprising results of how various countries score on GBV Risk, and how investors should interpret and integrate this data. And be sure to stay tuned to the very end where Jessica discusses the exciting new predictive modelling work they are doing now.
Resources mentioned during the episode:
29 - The causes of wealth inequality that no one is talking about
28 - A technology solution for solving the riddle of impact measurement and management
27 - Building better private equity structures and practices for a more equitable world
26 - Behind the scenes with an impact fund startup investing in African SMEs
25 - Leveraging employee ownership to fight wealth inequality
24 - The Purpose of Capital with Jed Emerson
23 - Breaking the shareholder primacy paradigm with alterantive ownership models
22 - Empowering indigenous innovators & communities
21 - Harnessing the vast untapped potential of newcomers to Canada
20 - How the Equality Fund is using Impact Investing to Fuel Feminist Futures
19 - Fighting a $200 Billion per year predatory industry using microfinance
18 - How Blended Finance is being used to massively scale the amount of capital for impact investments
17 - Around the world of impact investing with Rehana Nathoo
16 - Reinventing Commercial Banking for Good
15 - The best social return on investment? The case for delivering micro nutrients during the first 1,000 days of life
14 - Pioneering high-impact investments that create opportunity for the world's most vulnerable people
13 - Revitalizing the Indigenous economy by investing in Indigenous entrepreneurs
12 - Serving high net worth individuals, foundations, and institutions
11 - How to profit off the transition to a low carbon economy
10 - Challenging traditional philanthropy
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