Feminist finance? The agendas and economies of gender lens investing

Gender lens investing (GLI) is booming. However, while intersecting feminism and social finance, it has received scant attention from political economy scholarship on either. We argue it requires specific attention because it is not reducible to ‘social finance with gender’ or the ‘business case’ for gender equality, though it contains elements of both. Through a three-part analysis, we examine its discourse, markets, and actors to locate GLI within debates around feminism, neoliberalism and social finance. First, we identify three competing discursive narratives: firm-oriented GLI, development GLI, and radical GLI. Second, we map the GLI market and find that it is dominated by public money and institutional investors. Third, we examine participation at a GLI conference and observe that it seems steered by the financial sector. We argue that GLI currently resembles other forms of social finance: it legitimises the decisionmaking power of finance capitalists while offering a progressive veneer. It has generated a renewed discursive architecture that justifies interventions very close to microfinance, while its dominant mode of empowerment is the empowering of women in business and finance. Recognising its radical advocates, we propose avenues for further research and some alternate trajectories that speak to these more transformative agendas.