Category: Gender Lens Investing
Home / Gender Lens Investing /
March 14, 2025

Investing in Reproductive Rights: Strategies and Tactics for Impact Investors

Veris and Gratitude Railroad convened an event focused on Investing in Reproductive Rights in Denver in early March of 2025. Stephanie Cohn Rupp, CEO of Veris and Chair of the Board of US SIF, said in her introductory remarks, “In conversations covering women’s health and reproductive rights, policy interventions and grant making opportunities are often highlighted, but we believe it is equally important to discuss the ways that this area of impact is also investible.” 

Our goal for this session was to highlight a spectrum of approaches that investors can take to help expand women’s access to reproductive healthcare. Panelists Ruth Shaber, Rebekah Saul Butler, Erika Seth Davies, and Ronda Dean each brought their own unique perspective to the conversation. Below we share some of the key tactics and action steps suggested by the panelists, as well as a list of recommended resources for further exploration. 

Key Takeaways and Calls to Action

1. Ruth Shaber: Take a Total Portfolio Approach – Invest Across Asset Classes 

Ruth Shaber, an OB/GYN who founded Tara Health Foundation, underscored the impact that can be achieved through a fully mission-aligned portfolio. Using Tara Health Foundation’s 100% mission-aligned approach as an example, Shaber suggests that investors who want to help advance reproductive healthcare accessibility and innovation should seek to invest in reproductive health strategies across asset classes – including private investments, debt instruments, and public equities. 

Call to Action 

“Think about all of your capital – and who is managing your money. If we have more women making these sorts of decisions every day, particularly at the portfolio manager level, not only is your portfolio going to be stronger but those women are closer to the opportunities that we want to see capitalized.” -Ruth Shaber

Action step: Proactively evaluate and engage asset managers and advisors on their commitment to reproductive health issues and the approaches they are taking to drive positive outcomes. 

2. Erika Seth Davies: Shareholder Engagement

Erika Seth Davies, CEO of Rhia Ventures, an organization with a mission to leverage capital to advance reproductive and maternal health equity, discussed how shareholder engagement can be a powerful tool to advance reproductive health and rights. She gave examples of how Rhia Ventures has used corporate engagement strategies seeking to convince companies to update specific policies and data privacy standards that impact employees’ reproductive health. She noted that engagement strategies can also be used to hold companies accountable for their political contributions – calling out specific donations to candidates that do not support the company’s stated values or goals concerning reproductive rights for women, for example.  

Call to Action

“(Support) health equity, venture backed companies that are really trying to move the needle, not just at the top level of women’s health, but actually making sure that we close gaps that exist within women’s health. Health equity is crucial in this moment.” –Erika Seth Davies

Action step: Investors can use shareholder advocacy as a proactive strategy by engaging the companies you are invested in to adopt policies that support reproductive health and data privacy

3. Rebekah Saul Butler: Fund Early-Stage Innovation

Rebekah Saul Butler, a Managing Partner and CEO of Gratitude Railroad, which specializes in investing in innovative early stage companies and new fund managers, emphasized that reproductive health represents an under-invested yet high-potential area within broader women’s health markets. By investing in early-stage companies and emerging fund managers, she suggests investors can spur innovations that widen access to repro care, for example by supporting new ventures addressing the unmet healthcare needs of women who are under-resourced and under-served. 

Call to Action

“It’s important to focus on who’s allocating capital – who has the opportunity to put dollars into companies, and who has the opportunity to start and scale companies to ensure that these under invested sectors get the attention that they deserve, which is good for both reproductive health clients and for investors.” 

– Rebekah Saul Butler

Action step: Invest in emerging managers and early-stage companies that focus explicitly on reproductive health solutions. This approach bridges capital gaps, supports diverse and underserved entrepreneurs, and fosters meaningful innovations.

4. Ronda Dean: Support Public Benefit Corporations

Ronda Dean is CEO and founder of the healthcare enterprise Afaxys, a public benefit corporation which is one of the leading providers of contraceptives to patients served by clinics in the US public health sector for their reproductive health needs. Dean highlighted the importance of investing in enterprises that directly serve patients, particularly within public health and underserved communities. She emphasized investing in public benefit corporations that prioritize patients’ reproductive healthcare access, affordability, and innovation — particularly for contraception.

Call to Action

“Just keep moving forward. Move through the chaos. Don’t panic. And invest in women.” -Ronda Dean

Action step: Look for opportunities to invest in public benefit corporations that directly address critical gaps in reproductive healthcare delivery and innovation, ensuring the direct benefit to women at scale.

The Bottom Line

Reproductive rights investment presents a unique opportunity to combine financial returns with meaningful social impact. By adopting a portfolio-wide, proactive, and patient-centered approach, impact investors can help improve reproductive health outcomes, enhance healthcare equity, and drive meaningful innovation in a field ripe for investment and transformation.

Resources to Learn More

Featured panelists: (left to right) Ruth Shaber, Rebekah Saul Butler, Erika Seth Davies, and Ronda Dean. 

Panelist Bios

Rebekah Saul Butler

Rebekah Saul Butler is Managing Partner at Gratitude Railroad, an investor community-driven impact investment firm, where she serves as Co-CEO and jointly oversees all aspects of the growing business including investments, business strategy and development, and finance and operations. Learn more. 

Erika Seth Davies

Erika Seth Davies is the CEO of Rhia Ventures, which aims to transform the U.S. market for sexual, reproductive, and maternal health into a vibrant and equitable one through its impact investing, ecosystem building, corporate engagement, and narrative change work. She is a seasoned leader with more than 20 years of experience in development and fundraising, program design, collaboration and partnership management, and racial equity advocacy.  Learn more. 

Ronda Dean 

Ronda Dean is a senior executive with more than 30 years of accomplishments in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, including leadership of both for-profit and nonprofit organizations, offering a breadth of experience across various facets of the healthcare industry. Under her leadership, Afaxys has profitably launched 12 products in the sexual and reproductive health therapeutic categories and successfully executed a $20 million capitalization strategy. Learn More. 

Stephanie Cohn Rupp

Stephanie Cohn Rupp is the Chief Executive Officer and Partnership Chair at Veris Wealth Partners. She has more than 20 years of global impact investing experience. Based in Denver, she helps lead the firm’s impact wealth management growth strategies, financial performance, and client experience. Stephanie also serves as Board Chair of the US Sustainable Investment Forum (US SIF). Learn more.

Ruth Shaber

Ruth Shaber, MD founded and serves as President of the Tara Health Foundation, which uses its philanthropic capital to advance health and economic outcomes for women. She is the co-author of The XX Edge: Unlocking Higher Returns and Lower Risk and is now leading the Diverse Investing Collective, with the goal of increasing the numbers of women and people of color in the U.S. investment industry and the amount of assets they manage. Ruth is also the co-founder and board chair of Rhia Ventures. Ruth had a robust career as an Obstetrician and Gynecologist with a focus on systems change at Kaiser Permanente from 1990 to 2012. Learn more. 

 

Disclaimer

The information contained herein is provided for informational purposes only and should not be construed as the provision of personalized investment advice, or an offer to sell or the solicitation of any offer to buy any securities. Rather, the contents including, without limitation, any forecasts and projections, simply reflect the opinions and views of the author.

All expressions of opinion reflect the judgment of the author as of the date of publication and are subject to change without notice. There is no guarantee that the views and opinions expressed herein will come to pass. Additionally, this document contains information derived from third party sources. Although we believe these third-party sources to be reliable, we make no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information derived from such third party sources and take no responsibility, therefore.

 

May 1, 2024

Veris Interview Series: Dr. Ruth Shaber, Gender Lens & Impact Leader

Read More

August 8, 2023

A Tribute to Suzanne Biegel

By Alison Pyott

This August 8th, I am called to celebrate gender lens investing pioneer Suzanne Biegel. This is a tribute to my fellow Leo, colleague, collaborator, and most of all, friend. Suzanne has long been a source of insight, mentorship, and inspiration to me and to so many of us across the global impact space.

Read More

September 22, 2016

Gender Lens Investing: Growing Interest, Increasing Options

Editor’s Note: This blog is a complement to a new analysis of gender lens investing (GLI) strategies by Veris Wealth Partners and Women Effect. Gender lens investments direct capital to companies and organizations that support the status and well being of women and girls. To access this information, please visit Women Effect. To read Veris’ GLI analyses from 2013 and 2015, please go to our Research page.

 

By Luisamaria Ruiz Carlile, CFP®, Senior Wealth Manager, and Alison Pyott, Partner & Senior Wealth Manager

In a few short years, Gender Lens Investing has moved from promising concept to potentially one of the next big things in impact and sustainable investing.

That’s one of the clear takeaways from a new, joint analysis on Gender Lens Investing by Veris and Women Effect published this week.

Consider the following:

  • Assets Under Management (AUM) disclosed by GLI strategies investing in publically traded securities grew from $100 million as of Sept. 30, 2014 to $561 million as of June 30, 2016. That’s approaching a 500% increase.
  • As of June 30 2016, there were 15 public market GLI equity and debt solutions, up from nine as of Sept. 30, 2014. Two of the new vehicles target non-U.S investors, including Canadian and those in select European and Asian countries.
  • More than half of the growth in AUM has been in the Gender Diversity Index ETF (SHE) from State Street Global Advisors. The ETF was launched in March 2016 and was seeded with an initial $250 million from Calsters (California State Teachers Retirement System).

The growth is the result of an accelerating desire by individual and institutional investors to place capital in investments that directly benefit women and girls.

 

Investment in Gender Lens Strategies Reporting AUM
($561 Million as of June 30, 2016)

 gli-chart

“Expanding The Pie”

While the growth in GLI strategies has been heartening, equally important is the philosophical change they are engendering in the way we think about impact and sustainable investing.

For so long, many of us have viewed the world in “either/or” terms. Do we invest for societal and environmental benefits or purely financial returns? Do we opt for economic growth or a sustainable future?  Ingrained (and often subconscious) biases may lead us to believe that for minorities and women to advance, others must lose. Or, that if we choose inclusive companies, we are settling for less than stellar investment performance. Our reality is seemingly zero-sum. I win, you lose.

This represents a scarcity mentality, as if life’s opportunities were a static pie and sharing it with more people means less for everyone.

However, people, communities and the environment are not pies! We all exist in a dynamic ecosystem that constantly responds to new inputs.  GLI is a way to move beyond “either/or” thinking to “both/and” investing. More money invested in women and girls means more opportunities for society as a whole, men and boys included.

The good news is that GLI is taking off.  More investing solutions will emerge as momentum grows for investing for gender parity. At the same time, a more holistic view of GLI’s benefits will bring more investors into the space, and that will benefit every segment of society.

March 20, 2015

Veris Guest Blog: Gender Lens Investing 2.0

By Jem Hudson,  CEO of Caldy Group

“As a society, we own and shape the social constructs and financial systems that govern our lives. We make the rules. We assign the value. Yet we can feel removed from these processes and our power to bend the arc of our institutions.”

– Veris Wealth Partners

In celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8th, we came across a myriad of thoughtful articles, studies, and other discussions focusing on women’s issues. One of the resources that especially caught our eye is a study by Veris Wealth Partners, a boutique wealth management firm that has been leading the way in sustainable and impact investing.

Titled “Women, Wealth & Impact: Investing with a Gender Lens 2.0,” this highly informative study aims to shed light on the latest developments in gender lens investing and outlines some of the more commonly seen investment strategies used today. It also offers commentary on the importance of gender lens investing and its growing popularity.

What is gender lens investing? It is an investment approach that aims to encourage greater gender inclusion in our communities, our workplaces, and our boardrooms. It is important to note that gender lens investing is not one-sided. It does not focus solely on women’s issues, to the exclusion of other considerations. Quite the opposite! The Veris study explains:

“Gender lens investing is about making the world better for everyone through our investment choices. Investing in all of us, by all of us, has to be the ultimate goal.” (p. 1)

Gender lens investing typically looks at companies, funds, and other investment opportunities with an eye for how these investments align with the following criteria:

  1. Women’s leadership
  2. Women’s access to capital
  3. Products and services beneficial to women and girls
  4. Workplace equity
  5. Related shareholder engagement and policy work

Some investors target investments that explicitly focus on these issues, while others choose to invest in funds and portfolios that integrate these considerations into a broader set of factors or address these issues through stakeholder engagement. This is fairly consistent with what we see in the broader sustainable investing space, where some investment solutions deliver targeted impact, while others cast a wider net and deliver impact a bit more indirectly.

Gender lens investing is often categorized as a sustainable investment strategy because of its focus on non-financial considerations. Many investors still have questions about the financial viability of sustainable investing, and there is a sense that focusing on non-financial considerations will have a negative impact on financial performance. However, we agree with the Veris study in noticing that those investors who have studied the sustainable investing space in some detail increasingly “realize [that] they can generate both financial gains and positive social and environmental impact.” (p. 2)

In particular, if we look a bit more closely at some of the most recent research in the space, we will uncover mounting evidence that gender lens investing can deliver strong, if not superior, financial returns, as well as meaningful impact toward greater diversity and inclusion. This superior financial performance starts at the board level; studies find that Fortune 500 companies with three of more women on their boards of directors outperform those with no women directors by 84% on return on sales. In addition, according to a recent study by Gopal Krishnan and Linda Parsons, companies with greater gender diversity among senior executives tend to deliver stronger financial results than their less diverse peers. Lastly, women-led companies in Silicon Valley generate 12% higher revenues than similar venture-backed companies run by men. They are also run more efficiently and have lower failure rates than their male-led peers.

Despite all this evidence, women are still underrepresented on boards of directors, in executive suites, and among venture-backed entrepreneurs. It’s clear that more work needs to be done to achieve greater gender inclusion, and much has been said on this topic. But it’s important to remember that, as the Veris study so astutely notes “[a]s a society, we own and shape the social constructs and financial systems that govern our lives.” (p. 7) While it may be easier to simply discuss issues of gender inclusion, we can play a much more constructive role by leveraging our capital in a way that supports and encourages solutions that work.

To help in identifying solutions that work and funds that support them, the Veris study offers a list of investment funds that have demonstrated a strong commitment to gender lens investing, including Golden Seeds (private equity), PAX Ellevate (public equity), and Breckinridge (fixed income). There are several other funds that one can choose, and we are confident that many more funds will launch moving forward.

Regardless of which investment solution one selects, it’s important to remember that gender lens investing is not merely a niche strategy, but something we should aspire to for all of our investments. At the end of the day, we want to see a world where gender inclusion doesn’t need to be discussed in a white paper, but is simply a natural state of things.

Jem Hudson is Founder and CEO of Caldy Group, where this post was first published.