This paper focuses on gender equality in credit investing and practical steps to close the persistent data gap.
Gender inequality remains a major barrier on inclusive growth and economic resilience, especially in emerging markets. Gender equality is both an economic and investment imperative:
it has the potential to boost global GDP by over 20%.
Despite this, the gender-focused bond market represents less than 2% of the sustainable bonds.
However, this segment is growing rapidly, from around USD5 billion outstanding in 2020 to nearly $15 billion by the end of 2023.
A major challenge to market growth is the lack of gender-specific KPIs in many gender-focused sustainable bonds: only 5% of these bonds include outcome-level indicators.