Sustainable Investing Perspectives: Investing with a gender-lens

Brian Contreras· Host0:00

[intro music] Hi, everyone. Brian Contreras here. Welcome back to the Sustainable Investing Perspectives podcast series on the UBS Conversations podcast channel. We are joined here today by Preeti Sayanla, a portfolio manager at Fidelity Investments, and Tiffany Agard of CIO Investment Management. In this episode, we'll discuss investing with a gender lens. Statistics from the 2026 Gender Lens Investment Report from UBS Global Investment Management shows women hold 30% of US company board seats and make up 29% of C-suite executives. Yet only 1.3% of VC funding in the US and Europe went to companies founded by all women. While we are seeing advances in this space, there are still opportunities to advance gender equality, and leveraging your investments can be one way to do that. Tiffany, I think some people hear gender lens investing and are interested in it, but they don't really know what it is or how it works. Can you break down what gender lens investing is and how investors can begin to think about building a portfolio around it?

Tiffany Agard· Guest1:06

Great. Thank you, Brian. I think that's a perfect place to start. You know, one of the reasons why, uh, we wrote the report that you mentioned earlier was really to help demystify that process. So when we talk about gender lens investing, often people think about it as one idea, but in reality, it includes a range of objectives, instruments, assumptions, and ultimately