"[6] The practice of using investment to advance gender equality dates back to the 1970s, with the creation of initiatives such as Women's World Banking and Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank, which granted small loans to mostly women business owners in the Global South to facilitate their economic empowerment.
[7][8] But gender lens investing only emerged as a defined field in the 2000s and 2010s, when a group of investors and field builders - including Joy Anderson of the think tank Criterion Institute, Suzanne Biegel of Women Effect and later GenderSmart,[9] and Jackie VanderBrug,[9] co-author of the book Gender Lens Investing: Uncovering Opportunities for Growth, Returns, and Impact - began to work together to grow the portion of capital invested in women founders, and moved by women investors.
In March 2018, several development finance institutions (DFIs) hosted by CDC Group (now British International Investment) came together as the Gender Finance Collaborative, created to leverage the combined capital, capacity, networks, and knowledge to advance gender lens investing.
This expanded the gender lens approach beyond its initial North American base, to include actors in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
[10] Early examples of gender lens investing in mainstream finance include the Valeurs Feminines fund in France, created by the French money-management firm Conseil Plus Gestion in 2005 to invest in women-owned and women-led European businesses [7] Supporters of gender lens investing argue that firms with a higher-than-average proportion of women in executive roles tend to perform well, possibly because of an increased diversity of viewpoints or because not discriminating against women allows companies to hire the best available talent.