The World Bank's Women, Business and the Law 2024. We found it difficult to identify the worst statistics in this latest annual edition of the World Bank’s frontline work on women’s legal rights around the world. Here is one. In 81 economies women’s pension benefits do not account for work absences due to childcare. Corresponding stats only worsen this picture. A full 62 economies have a women’s retirement age that is earlier than men’s, and only 15% of economies provide incentives that affect women’s retirement benefits. And here is the catch: Pension gaps, combined with never-ending gender pay gaps, result in significant gender wealth gaps. The average global score on the pension indicator was 74.5, modestly higher than the average overall score of 64.2.  

Women in Work 2024. PwC released its Women in Work 2024 report on five gender equality indicators in 33 OECD countries as of 2022. The average country score has moved up slowly from 56.3 in 2011 to 68 in 2022. Improvement from 2021 to 2022 was driven by an increase in the women’s labor force participation rate from 70.8% to 72.1% and a decline in women’s unemployment. In contrast, the average OECD gender pay gap actually WIDENED in the same period. At the current pace, it will take more than 50 years to close the OECD gender pay gap. (Decidedly NOT the news we wanted to hear at the start of international women’s month.) Compared to 2011, the pay gap has only improved by three percentage points. On a country basis, Luxembourg ranked highest in overall scores, while Chile, Korea, and Mexico ranked lowest. The United States ranked 25 out of the 33 countries in the study. Ouch! Australia saw the most improvement, while the U.K. turned in the largest fall in ranking, which was largely a relative change, as other countries turned in stronger improvements. 

Australia’s unadjusted (average earnings) gender pay gap is 21.7%. This is the difference between all women earners and all men earners, including salary, overtime, bonuses, and any additional remunerations, as well as the annualized full-time earnings of part-time and seasonal workers. The median gender pay gap stands at 19%. This first annual dataset has been released as a result of Australia’s updated pay gap law requiring the government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency to publish industry and company data, following from the 2012 law for companies with at least 100 employees to calculate and report gender pay gap data. How did financial services employers do? Poor to dismal, with an industry average gender pay gap of 26.1%. Morgan Stanley Australia had a gender pay gap of 48.2%, followed by UBS at 42.7% and Barrenjoey Services at 42.5%. The next worst scorers were Merrill Lynch Australia (41.8%), Deutsche Australia (37.7%), Goldman Sachs Australia (37.2%), and Jarden Australia (36.3%). (Don’t get us started on the lame “working on it” quotes which followed from this data…)  

More of the same. MSCI Inc. finds very slow progress for women in corporate leadership in the All-Country World (ACWI) Index, which includes developed and emerging markets large- and mid-cap constituents. For 2023, women’s board representation inched up one percentage point to 25.8%. Only 9.1% of board chair roles were held by women. Board representation for women and other underrepresented groups is being supported by increasing mandates, including an E.U. mandate for 40% of nonexecutive directorships to be held by the underrepresented gender by 2026. The report cites the importance of retaining women, noting recent trends in faster turnover for women directors. Only 22.4% of the developed markets MSCI World Index constituents demonstrated three years of continuous board representation for women as of 2023. In a frustrating trend seen across global and regional market indexes, women’s representation in the C-suite lags far behind, with only 6.5% of CEO roles in the ACWI held by women. Women CFOs comprised 18.8% of the ACWI, with 16.4% for the World Index and a stronger 21.3% for the MSCI Emerging Markets Index.

In Gender Lens Equity news…
The Pink Chip Index. This is a new educational tool for investors to understand how companies with women CEOs perform. The tool, which is not a financial product, tracks U.S. public companies with a market cap of over $2 billion, three years of at least 8% compound annual revenue growth, and a woman CEO. Introduced earlier this month, Pink Chip is a non-profit joint initiative from design and communication agency AKQA, UN Women Nederland, and Thematic, an AI-powered investment research platform launched in 2023. The custom weighted index currently has 44 companies, and the top three sectors are finance, health technology, and producer manufacturing. We look forward to watching this tool and any others launched by this initiative. 
 
Congratulations to the Impact Shares team. The YWCA Women's Empowerment Fund recently announced that it reached $50 million in AUM (as of 1/25/2024). The fund is among the more than 40 gender lens equity funds in our coverage universe. With $4.4 billion in total assets under management, this suite of gender lens equity funds has grown from the body of research demonstrating the performance and other corporate benefits of higher levels of women-in-leadership (WIL). Fund criteria are centered around investing in companies with higher WIL levels and strong additional equality metrics, including pay equity and disclosure, gender diversity at all workforce levels, and policies supportive of retaining and promoting women.

In Gender Lens Fixed Income news…
Congrats also to Luxembourg Green Exchange (LGX). The LGX reached EUR1 trillion in outstanding Green, Social, Sustainability, and Sustainability-linked (GSSS) bonds earlier this quarter. Launched in 2016 to contribute to the goals of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement, LGX is a leader in sustainable finance. The exchange serves over 310 issuers from 60 countries – which have issued 1,900 GSSS bonds in 41 currencies. As we have highlighted a number of times here, these include LGX listings of Gender bonds from several regions.

Second Gender bond by Pro Mujer. On International Women’s Day, the second Gender bond issued by Pro Mujer was listed and displayed on the LGX. Three cheers! This ARS370 million (USD1 million) bond aims to provide 1,300 loans to women-owned micro and small enterprises in Argentina, as well as extend credit lines for health care, financial education, and related services for these women and their families. Pro Mujer is a non-profit with a 30+ year history of providing financing and services to over 2.5 million women throughout Latin America. 
 
Spotlight on the potential for gender lens investing (GLI) in Bangladesh. In the lead-up to International Women’s Day, a groundbreaking event in Dhaka, 'Building Inclusive Women in the Financial Markets in Bangladesh', was led by women leaders from the UN and a number of country missions. The event was hosted by the UNDP and Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) and focused on the critical role that GLI can play in financial sector initiatives aligned with the Smart Bangladesh Initiative 2041. The event highlighted IIX’s Orange Initiative, which seeks to create a global asset class centered on the Global South and serving as a financing solution for gender equality. According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2023, Bangladesh ranks 59 out of 146 countries on overall gender equality. It comes in a very low 139 in the economic participation and opportunity sub-index, despite a high ranking of 7 on political empowerment. Its education ranking is 122 and a low 126 on health and safety. Very clearly there is long way to go on investing in Bangladesh’s women and girls – with a strong role for GLI. For starters, micro-, small- and medium enterprises (MSMEs) make up 25% of GDP, and the financial needs of 60% of women-owned MSMEs are unmet.

When will we see the first gender bond in Bangladesh? In 2022, the Bangladesh Securities and Exchange Commission (BSEC) announced plans for the issuance of gender bonds in the country. The Orange Initiative seeks to foster growth in gender bonds and has issued the Orange Bond Principles, an emerging global standard in gender bond principles. We are proud to be a part of this movement as Orange Bond verifiers.