rotmanmagazine.ca / 81IMAGINE 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 Manage-
ment, 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 innova-
tion 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, show-
ing 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 ‘invest-
ing with a gender lens’ is deceptively simple: The deliberate
integration of gender analysis into investment analysis and
decision-making. By asking deeper questions about inclusive-
ness in the enterprises in which they invest, gender lens inves-
tors believe they will get better outcomes — both financial and
societal.
According to Bank of America executive Jackie Vander-
Brug — who pioneered the approach — two trends have con-
verged to accelerate broad acceptance of gender-lens invest-
ing. “First, investors — even mainstream institutional investors
— are taking sustainable and responsible investing (SRI) much
more seriously,” she says. “The 2015 publication of the Black-
Rock-Ceres guide to incorporating environmental, social andHow Como panies are Moving
the Needle on Gender Equalitye
Bank of America and Walmart are just two of a growing number of
companies taking decisive steps towards eradicating gender inequality.
by Karen Christensen