According to the 2024 Sustainable Development Goals report from the UN, the world is not on track to meet the targets set by Goal 5: gender equality. This gap is illustrated in women’s domestic and professional lives, with women taking on a disproportionate burden of unpaid care coupled with insufficient gains in corporate leadership. Around the world, over two billion women are denied access to equal economic opportunities, and a 2023 World Economic Forum study put the financing gap for women entrepreneurs at $1.7 trillion USD. According to the UN 2023 Gender Snapshot report, an additional $360 billion USD investment is needed per year to achieve gender equality.

There are solutions to addressing this gap, however, and impact investing plays a fundamental role by providing capital for these solutions. As defined by the GIIN, gender lens investing (GLI) is a strategy or approach to investing that considers gender-based factors across the investment process to advance gender equality and better inform investment decisions. There is no single, industry-wide definition of GLI. As such, it is best understood as a series of investing innovations through the intentional leveraging of women’s inclusion, empowerment and advancement, amongst other catalysts towards gender equality.

In this report, the GIIN highlights the 27% of the respondents in its 2024 Impact Investor Survey who allocated 30% or more of their impact assets under management (AUM) towards investees that are majority-owned or -led by women. This report analyzes the progress made by gender investors in the past year in order to better understand how private sector efforts are helping to bridge gender equity gaps.

Key findings:

  • Investment growth: Ninety percent of gender investors met or exceeded their financial expectations, with 97% achieving their impact targets.
  • Strong performance: Seventy-five percent of gender investor respondents reported that the benefit of adopting GLI was the ability to achieve greater impact, with just over half (51%) reporting the benefits of strong impact results and better financial performance. 
  • Geographic breakdown: While 42% of gender investors focused on emerging markets, these regions account for only 18% of total impact AUM compared to developed markets, which attracted 66% of impact AUM from a similar percentage of investors (48%).
  • SDG alignment: Gender investors target all 17 Sustainable Development Goals, not just gender equality and prioritize sectors like energy, infrastructure and housing, with 64% who planned to increase allocations.

This report is part of the GIIN’s 2024 market intelligence series, based on the 2024 Impact Investor Survey. It captures reliable data from 305 organizations across 39 countries.

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In Focus: Gender and Impact Investing in 2024

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