How improving gender equality can enhance corporate performance

RobecoSAM managers

Junwei Hafner-Cai and Olaf Martin, managers of the RobecoSAM Global Gender Equality Impact Equities fund, talk to Katrina Lloyd about their new fund and why companies need to encourage more diversity in the workplace.

Why did you decide to launch the RobecoSAM Global Gender Equality Impact Equities strategy? We found investing in a high gender equality portfolio outperformed the lower gender equality portfolio over the last ten years. As a group, we have been focused exclusively on sustainability investing (SI) for over 22 years, and have been selecting financially material ESG data since 1999. For assessing companies on gender equality performance, we partnered with EDGE Certified Foundation in 2012 to further develop the gender diversity and equality criteria in the RobecoSAM Corporate Sustainabil...