84 / Rotman Management Spring 20 19
Gender Lens Investing: Three Goals
Walmart has a number of mechanisms designed to attract
women to become our suppliers. “We do ‘open calls’, where
we ask people to come and pitch their product. Working with
WBENC and WeConnect International, organizations that cer-
tify women’s businesses, we have found many woman-owned
companies to join forces with. One woman who started out sell-
ing tortillas on a street corner in Atlanta now sells her products
at Walmart; and there is a woman-owned business that makes
popsicles who is now one of our largest suppliers.”
The second aspect of WEE involves providing training
for women to help elevate their livelihoods. A few years back,
Walmart committed to training one million women — 800,000
in emerging markets and 200,000 lower-income women in the
U.S. — to help them secure better jobs. In emerging markets, the
program included 131,000 women in factories in China, India,
Bangladesh, Central America and South America.
“We worked with different partners in different countries,
including BSR (Business for Social Responsibility) and Wo rl d
Vision. In the agriculture realm, we did a different kind of train-
ing, working with women around productivity and yield sus-
tainability. For this, our partners included Mercy Corp, Tech-
noserve’s One Acre Fund and the Gates Foundation.”
The retail-focused training was split between the U.S. and
emerging markets, and its goal was simple: To help women get
their first job in organized retail. “In Kenya, we worked with
Samasource and women in villages, literally teaching them to
code product descriptions for the Internet. These employees can
work from home and participate in global e-commerce retail.
For others, the program might have helped them get a job at their
local bodega.”
Along the way, McLaughlin and her team have learned a few
key lessons. “Obviously, the first challenge was getting our own
leadership to agree to our sourcing commitments. To do that, you
need to gather the results around innovation, perception of the
customer and higher growth rates. We ended up having higher
margins in many of these categories, primarily because the wom-
en-owned businesses tended to produce more innovative and
interesting products.”
Second, as indicated, they did lots of partnering with
different groups to bring the initiative to life. “In China, it took
us several years just to figure out which businesses were wom-
en-owned because there is no simple directory where you can
look at ownership structure and leadership and so on. We had
to build that fact-base from the ground-up by meeting people
and companies.”
Third, every market is different. “Ironically, Canada, was
one of the hardest markets to get going because its legal frame-
work is such that you don’t really ask, ‘Is this a woman-led busi-FOCUS #1: Improve access to capital. Consistently, women
receive six to seven per cent of available venture capital, and
the story is even worse for women of colour. The problem is not
restricted to the U.S. The data indicates a $ 320 billion gap in
terms of funding for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
who have a woman on their founding team. We refer to this as
‘capital punishment’, and as a result of it, the World Bank and
other developmental finance institutions have started to proac-
tively move capital in this direction.
Not surprisingly, as a result of the reality faced by women
entrepreneurs, the goals in this arena are very conservative: We
are hopeful that by 2025, one-quarter of all venture deals in the
U.S. will have at least one woman on the founding team. Achiev-ing this target will require a lot of behavioural interventions in
terms of networks, changing the process for reviewing deals
and much more.FOCUS # 2 : Promote equity along the entire value chain.
Some investors use a lens where they look across a company’s
entire value chain to gauge whether it is valuing women and
men equally. To do this, they might look at the composition of
the board and senior management, at promotion processes and
even at the supply chain. The news on this front is encouraging:
McKinsey & Company has found that companies with more
women in leadership are 21 per cent more likely to deliver finan-
cial returns above industry means. And quantitative analysts