Past Projects

GenderSmart is a global initiative dedicated to unlocking strategic, impactful gender-smart capital at scale.

It does this in several ways:

1. By translating gender finance insights across asset classes and geographies in our research, content, blog, and newsletter

2. By connecting senior investment influencers and thought leaders, intermediaries, and experts to the resources, tools, and people they need to advance their work

3. By building investor capacity at global Summits, in working groups, and through partnership programming designed around the needs and challenges of the field. Current working groups include Climate and Gender Finance, and JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion). Following a successful virtual programme in Summer 2020, the GenderSmart Global Summit 2021 was an immersive virtual experience. The theme was Crisis as Catalyst.

Find out more here, and follow @gendersmartIS on Twitter for news about the Summit and other programming.

Getting Gender Smart was a three-day intensive course introducing investors, fund managers, and philanthropists to the emerging world of gender smart investing.

A collaboration between Catalyst at Large and Carrie Gonnella of Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship, the course was designed to help participants quickly and easily integrate gender smart investing as part of their overall investing practice, including:

• Evaluating your own objectives and those of your key stakeholders;

• Exploring the markets for impact investing, including opportunities in both public and private markets;

• Integrating gender lens practices across the key steps of your investment process, including due diligence, structuring, and closing deals, governance, managing for impactful exits, and portfolio management.

• Evaluating and performing gender lens screening and due diligence of funds, both public and private, as well as of individual deals;

• Understanding current practices in impact measurement and management from a gender lens perspective and opportunities to improve gender outcomes in your existing portfolios; and

• Understanding the range of available resources and consultants available to help you along the way and how to select and work with them.

Getting Gender Smart took place March 11-13, 2019 and September 9-11, 2019 at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. We will be offering the course again in late September, 2020, and if you want to be notified of future dates and registration, click here to share your contact information.

Created in collaboration with Tara Health Foundation’s Ruth Shaber and Nexial’s Marshall Clemens and Alexandra Kanitz, the Gender Finance System Map presents a comprehensive illustration of the actors, tools, initiatives, and types of capital that comprise the gender finance system, as well as the barriers and opportunities for systemic change.

Women Effect is an initiative which transitioned in 2017 to the Wharton Social Impact Initiative (WSII) at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, to provide an information hub for content and experience in the field of investing with a gender lens, women as investors, and investing to have a positive effect on women and girls. Women Effect was originally an independent initiative, founded by Suzanne Biegel, fiscally sponsored by Criterion Institute and supported by a visionary group of funders. The initiative moved to WSII in March, 2017, with some significant changes, carrying forward a research and evidence building agenda and helping a variety of actors to make sense of this emerging field.

The work of many visionary leaders has inspired a movement that believes in the power of finance to achieve large-scale social impact and to address some of our most pressing economic and social issues. The goal with Women Effect was to increase the capital moving with a gender lens, creating durable and systemic change for women and girls worldwide – both as investors and beneficiaries of invested capital. As the initiative shifted to WSII, the work is framed in some new contexts. The field of gender lens investing is in its early stages and spans a broad diversity of actors and activities. In addition to her other industry roles and consulting, Suzanne Biegel is Senior Gender Lens Investing Adviser at WSII. This fits in with the broader work of Catalyst at Large to inspire and activate people and institutions to move more capital, more strategically, with more velocity, with a gender lens.