Unlocking Potential: The Opportunity Cost of Neglecting Gender in Investment, An Annotated Bibliography
Summary
This annotated bibliography highlights the range of opportunity costs for organisations and investors not applying a gender lens, as evident in literature. It examines these lost opportunities by looking at the trends, gaps, opportunities, and barriers to gender lens investing (GLI) in Investing in Women’s (IW) countries of focus – Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam, and in the region.
The annotated bibliography found a strong case for GLI based on both strategic gains (the ‘business case’) as well as moral imperatives (the ‘right thing to do’). However, more data is needed to better understand investor motivations and resistance to GLI. While GLI is growing in popularity, its application is varied. It is also not well understood and lacks a common definition and reporting approach.
This serves as a resource for different actors in the investment ecosystem looking to adopt gender lens investing. Additionally, it can serve as a starting point for further research that contributes to the understanding and advances the practice of GLI in Southeast Asia.
This annotated bibliography is produced by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at the Australia National University, at the request of IW.
Highlights
Overarching trends and gaps
- A strong case for GLI exists in the literature, based on strategic gains (the ‘business case’ – return on investment, etc.) and moral imperatives (helping to address systemic economic gender inequalities, including primarily in business funding).
- However, emerging data on why investors choose to invest or not to invest with a gender lens highlights concerns, including: perceived lost opportunity from excluding non-GLI investments due to a GLI focus; perceived riskiness of GLI, therefore risk aversion towards investments with a gender lens; perception that mentoring, networking, and support is needed for women entrepreneurs; lack of education/awareness on GLI for investors; and lack of will to invest with a gender lens.
- Multiple tools exist to encourage GLI. Among them are ‘stick’ (compliance) and ‘carrot’ (opportunity/business case) approaches; although little data exists on what is most effective.
- Literature is missing some empirical rigour in terms of access to investor motivations/perceptions/understandings and measuring GLI against business experiences and performance.
- Literature suggests that women’s presence at senior levels in funds and firms should be prioritised when measuring the impact of GLI. The prevalence of women’s participation in ownership, leadership, and management of funds and the firms in which they invest is closely correlated not only with the prevalence of GLI, but also the overall performance of funds and their investment portfolios.
- GLI could be better defined to aid investors in thinking about their impact, whether they intend for GLI to benefit only women-led or women owned enterprises, or enterprises that prioritise gender equality, or both.
- Better data rigour is needed on measuring the opportunity costs of not implementing a GLI strategy. It is also unknown whether knowing the opportunity cost or not actually motivates action.
- More regionally specific research is needed, as is data disaggregated by size of business and understanding of how much capital is being invested informally to determine exact demand, including informal demand.
