As You Sow Takes New Step in Mobile Payments, Investing

Investing online comes with plenty of options, and that’s both its greatest blessing and deepest curse. For those who want to invest ethically, however they may see it, that surfeit of options can be especially difficult to manage. As You Sow recently stepped in to let us know about a new option, its latest screening tool, the Gender Equality Funds tool.

Gender Equality Funds is, according to the word from As You Sow, the fifth in a series of investment tools known as the Invest Your Values series. Gender Equality Funds is geared towards, as the name makes fairly clear, gender equality in investment. It suggests mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) based on a pool of roughly 5,000 mutual funds that have high rankings in 12 separate gender equality performance indicators.

Some of these indicators are gender diversity and gender balance in the workforce, management, and leadership of the companies involved. It calls on data from Morningstar and Equileap, which is known for providing data on workplace gender equality.

As You Sow CEO Andrew Behar noted “Women comprise 47 percent of the workforce, but only 4.8 percent of S&P 500 companies have female CEOs. The new tool empowers investors to see what is hidden within the mutual funds that comprise the bulk of their retirement savings and 401(k) plans. The first step is to know what you own — then you can use the power of your capital to invest in companies that have policies and practices that promote gender equality.”

About the only thing that matters here is that the tool works, and based on what we know, it does work. It provides the desired information quickly and readily, and makes it clear enough for use. While placing investments based on values may not be the surest path to profitability, it does provide a way to invest that lets you sleep at night, and peace of mind is a good investment in its own right.

Investing your values isn’t a bad idea, though it might prove counterproductive. Only time will tell just how well it works, and it would be great to get some numbers on just that.