The Seeds of Change: How Companies are Moving the Needle on Gender Equality
IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE EVERY LEADER in every organization takes concrete steps to address the issue of gender inequality. That’s the world that Sarah Kaplan, founding director of the Institute for Gender and the Economy at the Rotman School of Management, is working towards with her team.
When asked what it will take to fix the current situation — in which only 22 per cent of senior executives are female (many fewer are CEOs) and only six to seven per cent of venture capital funding goes to woman-owned businesses — Prof. Kaplan has a one-word answer: innovation. It will be next to impossible, she says, to make any further progress if we continue to do the same old things within the same old system. “We need to approach diversity — of all kinds, not just gender diversity — as an innovation problem,” she says, “and make this challenge as exciting as every other innovation challenge out there.”
The good news is that many organizations have taken this challenge to heart. In this article we highlight two of them, showing that, once we admit that biases are built into our systems for hiring, evaluating and investing, we can find ways to change the system itself.
Gender Lens Investing
In an increasingly complex world, the definition of ‘investing with a gender lens’ is deceptively simple: The deliberate integration of gender analysis into investment analysis and decision-making. By asking deeper questions about inclusiveness in the enterprises in which they invest, gender lens investors believe they will get better outcomes — both financial and societal.
According to Bank of America executive who pioneered the approach — two trends have converged to accelerate broad acceptance of gender-lens investing. “First, guide to incorporating environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into corporate interactions for institutional investors was a notable milestone, pairing the expertise of the largest money management firm in the world and the oldest shareholder engagement advocacy group.”
