There might be inconsistencies within the article that perhaps need explanation and further reference.
In the third paragraph it is stated that “the gender lens investment philosophy is rooted in the proven corporate benefits of higher levels of women in leadership”. Nevertheless, in the very first two paragraphs, the underperformance of gender lens indexes compared to the S&P500 or the MSCI World index in the first quarter is precisely quantified. In particular, MSCI World Women’s Leadership Index posted -25.63% while MSCI World Index declined by a lower amount (-21.05%). This is bound to not go unnoticed by the eyes of a careful reader.
When retrieving a larger picture of the historical performance comparison of the indexes, one can in fact easily find that the MSCI Women’s Leadership has systematically underperformed its benchmark: https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/ee63066d-7b32-468a-8b3a-88560185f2…. Visually, it appears as if the Women MSCI were experiencing a contango effect. Bringing the argument to the extreme, one could actually make a case for profiting from an arbitrage trading strategy which holds a short position on the Women MSCI and a long position on the MSCI World.
Under this light, the author’s statement mentioned above appears to be puzzling. One should define what exactly the corporate benefits of having higher levels of women in leadership are. Furthermore, one must keep in mind the existing discordance between the findings put forward by academic and non-academic papers. Basing one’s conclusion on the latter exposes to the risk of constructing a theory on pre-selected data tested on insufficiently large time frames. Especially in recent time, most private company research on the topic has shown to be polluted by political bias. Academic research is on average more rigorous and the findings are repeatedly and independently re-tested over wide time frames. A very good summary of the problems of considering private companies research on the topic of gender diversity on board was made by Katherine Klein: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/will-gender-diversity-board…
In my eyes though, the biggest problem is represented by the huge amount of academic research which actually finds a negative correlation between bio-demographic diversity (as for example gender) and performance. This is because no single one study, especially if conducted in a non-peer reviewed frame can disprove that. See for example: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228389271_The_Effects_of_Team_….