An article written by FDI Center’s Director, Dr Kim J. Zietlow was recently published on Investment Monitor’s website. The article, titled: Gender equality in investment promotion: The need for a data-driven approach, discusses the results from our proprietary gender equality survey completed by global IPAs.   

Today, IPAs around the world are implementing measures to become more diverse and inclusive. However, there is no quantitative data on the drivers of gender equality inside IPAs and the effects on an IPA’s work in investment attraction, facilitation, aftercare, and policy advocacy. Hence, investment promotion practitioners who aim to move the needle in their own organisation rely on anecdotes and case studies and cannot draw from systematically analysed and proven measures.  

Addressing the need for a data-driven approach, FDI Center conducted a global survey of IPAs from across every continent. The survey included questions regarding the employee and leadership gender balance of IPAs, whether an IPA had internal measures or policies to support gender equality internally as well as externally, and what the most common actions being taken were. The Investment Monitor article presents key results and highlights recommendations and best practices by practitioners underlying the quantitative results. 

These findings are published in the article, with visual data on; 

Graph 1: The areas IPAs are taking action to mainstream gender equality in investment promotion. 

Graph 2: Percentage of IPAs taking action. 

Graph 3: Ranking of the most to least common actions being taken by IPAs. 

The article, including the graphs, can be viewed on Investment Monitor’s website here.  The findings were also presented in the first webinar of our Towards Gender Equality in FDI initiative, which is also available to view online.