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.