Where Are the Women?
Our blind spots as professionals, leaders and individuals emanate from a number of sources, perhaps the most pernicious among them being the habit of believing we already know about things that we don’t. In my case, I felt quite sure that I knew most everything there was to know about women and investing. After all, I am a woman entrepreneur. I am a woman investor. And I am a woman VC general partner. I don’t need someone to tell me about being a woman in this space.
Oh wait — apparently, I do. And her name is Suzanne Biegel.
A few Mondays back, in a law firm conference room in the clouds 23 floors above the North Vancouver harbor, I had the opportunity to join a workshop that Suzanne led on gender lens investing.
My prior understanding of gender lens investing can be summed up as follows: it’s smart for companies to have women on teams and governance bodies, and research is starting to bear out that these companies financially outperform competitors.
My new understanding of gender lens investing: Asking “where are the women and girls?” across every aspect of a company can expose opportunities to add significant value for investors and other stakeholders, while better addressing the needs of 50+% of our planet’s population.
Suzanne guided us well beyond my superficial snapshot of team and governance issues, delving into a sample due diligence exercise that unearthed important opportunities across product design, supply chain, marketing channels, user experience, and buyer decision-making. In short, the whole damn company.
A quick mental scan of my portfolio raised a series of uncomfortable “duh” moments as I thought through the myriad questions I had, quite simply, never thought to ask.
MobileODT is an incredible cancer diagnostics company formed to save the lives of the 270,000 women who die unnecessarily from cervical cancer each year, the majority of whom are in the developing world.
To what extent were women involved or consulted in the initial product design? How was women’s feedback from the experience incorporated currently?
How could we have best partnered with women health workers and orgs to bring the product to more audiences more effectively, more quickly, more inexpensively?
The company had inadvertently made “cervix selfies” a hit, giving women across Africa the chance to own and show off a photo of a part of their body whose very name had been taboo. Are there ways we could have predicted, planned for and better leveraged this incredible empowerment? What other aspects of female health could be improved through better ownership and transparency of patient data?
CodeMonkey is an online game, used in classrooms and B2C, that teaches children how to code. The investment opportunity had been particularly attractive to me because they had demonstrated success in encouraging programming skills and a path toward lucrative tech careers for underrepresented populations, specifically girls and Arab-Israelis. If they could bridge these gaps here, they could do it abroad as well, reducing disparities in the dozen plus countries where they sell.
But what efforts were we making — in product design, marketing, channel selection — to specifically ensure female adoption of the product?
Could we track gender of B2C consumers? Did girls have a different user experience and were there ways to enhance it?
Had the company thought through the ways in which the teacher support and sales processes may be optimized to better serve its majority female customer base?
HelpAround provides the technology for medical device and pharma companies to better support their customers who are managing chronic illnesses. Beyond better health outcomes, smart patient support services educate, reduce stress, and provide community for individuals struggling under the burden of caring for themselves or loved ones.
How does the burden of care differ for women and men among major chronic illnesses? Which conditions might affect women disproportionately and what opportunities might exist for us to better support them?
What is the user experience for mothers who are using the product to care for children with chronic diseases? Have we held focus groups to improve the user experience and product adoption for mothers who are using the product to care for children with chronic diseases? What are their specific needs that we might be missing?
Could we make the AI more effective in timing nudges, alerts and adherence reminders if we paid closer attention to gender and how the average woman’s daily routine differs from that of a man?
Professional caregivers in the US represent one of the top three fastest growing jobs in absolute numbers, and overwhelmingly consists of low-income females. How could we better support, educate and empower this population? Is there opportunity for partnerships to encourage product adoption?
Posing the simple question of “where are the women?” across all aspects of a company’s life cycle and value chain holds innumerable ways for us to (1) better support women and girls, and (2) to create and derive value within every company.
And this eye-opener was only the beginning of my gender lens learning journey. Suzanne’s firm, Catalyst at Large, provides a host of ideas on how we can further engage and educate ourselves, whether as entrepreneurs, individual investors, or asset managers. Count me in for their Global Gender Lens Investing Summit in London November 1–2, 2018. Still so much to learn as I continue to train my eye on this issue — for the aim of benefitting women, girls and LPs everywhere.
