As the world recognizes 2017 International Women’s Day, Katherine Burke finds herself within an industry still dominated by men.

Yet Burke, a portfolio manager at Athena Capital Advisors, has found a way to strike a blow for equality while reaping financial returns for her clients: gender lens investing.

Gender lens investing maintains primary focus on financial returns, but also promotes equal opportunity and financial inclusion for women, says Burke.

Lisette Cooper, who founded the Lincoln, Mass.-based RIA in 1993 and is a speaker at FA's Invest In Women conference, began with a focus on fiduciary wellness. Within three years, Athena was awarded its first socially responsible investing mandate.

Since its foundation, Cooper has strived to maintain diversity within Athena’s ranks, but has not necessarily used gender parity as an investment rationale.

“We’re about 50 percent men and 50 percent women; I think that we reflected gender equality within our corporate culture,” says Cooper, who serves as managing partner and CIO at Athena. “We are there to meet the needs of our clients, and we have a mandate to provide strong risk-adjusted returns for them. Data supporting gender lens as a strategy wasn’t available until fairly recently.”

Now, around 25 percent of Athena’s clientele, comprised mostly of foundations, endowments and the ultra-wealthy, are impact-oriented investors.

It was only recently that the firm, which now has more than $6 billion in AUM, began to focus on gender lens investing.

“We took on a client in 2013 that had a tremendous passion for this area and wanted to take a leadership role in making a difference in gender equality,” says Burke. “We saw that as an opportunity to build out our philosophy and approach.”

Athena took several different approaches to gender lens investing before deciding that gender inclusion could be a factor driving returns – in other words, benchmark-beating returns and gender equality are not mutually exclusive.

“This is one of the areas within the field of impact investing where there appears to be the potential for additional returns,” says Burke.

After attempting to employ screens to avoid the worst offenders in gender inequality and to capture only the most socially responsible companies, Cooper and her team found that they had whittled down the investing universe into a small cohort of companies.

When Athena tried to apply similar screens to funds, only using funds with gender inclusion on their management teams, they also found that they were left with a set of potential investments not at all representative of the investment universe -- a sign of poor diversity within the financial industry.

“There are asset classes and sectors that have very few women fund managers or corporate executives at all,” says Burke.

By focusing on funds run by women, Athena is able to diversify across asset classes into private equity and hedge funds, then apply a weighting strategy, excluding companies with no women and emphasizing companies with balanced management.

The result is a strategy that, to date, has beaten the S&P 500 by more than 500 basis points, says Burke.

“There really is a benefit to gender lens investing,” says Burke. “Certain qualities go along with women and companies in terms of risk mitigation and not being over confident, yet you also want the qualities that go along with men -- you do want to take risks. That’s why it’s important ot emphasize diversified teams.”

Gender lens investing is also accessible via indexes -- Pax World Investments has offered the Pax Ellevate Global Women’s Index Fund, or PXWEX, since 2014, while State Street Global Advsors launched the SPDR SSGA Gender Diversity Index ETF, or SHE, in 2016.

Athena’s strategies may provide better opportunities for certain investors because they are able to look across asset classes and geographies, says Burke.

“It’s fantastic that there’s an ETF that can do this, for smaller, individual investors that seems like a terrific way to go,” says Burke. “We can customize these portfolios for the client; for someone with more money to invest, these strategies may offer a better after tax return.”

Athena not only invests in funds that include women within their management and companies that promote women within the workplace via gender lens investing, but also in firms and causes that support gender equality.

For example, Cooper notes that Athena helps clients to access private equity opportunities that invest in companies that bring low-cost sanitary products to Africa, or that provide potable, running water in emerging market countries so women don’t have to walk back and forth to communal wells, or that offer lending focused on women.

“We’ve found that people are broadly interested in issues of diversity and inclusion,” says Burke. “Gender lens investing is a very particular way of approaching that goal; the impact trickles down from investing in companies that benefit and promote women.”

This type of investor feminism can’t merely focus on companies that give equal weight to men and women in the workplace, says Burke, but centers on firms those that emphasize women and women’s causes. After centuries of gender inequality, it’s not enough for society to be inclusive -- women must take precedence.

“Unlike the majority population, women and minorities often do need a protected or preferential status,” Cooper says. “I can say from experience, it’s hard to be a woman in an industry that’s dominated by men. You’re expected to take on male characteristics in order to be successful. For women to be the most successful, they have to be allowed to be themselves. That requires a certain amount of support, and that’s where feminism comes into play.”