This guide on investing helps to further the rights and empowerment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) individuals. We live in a moment where cultural norms, behaviours, and laws related to LGBTQI individuals are changing significantly around the globe. On the one hand, there are expanded freedoms for our sexual orientations and gender identities. On the other, persecution and discrimination continue, and in some places are on the rise. Through integrating an LGBTQI lens into the process, structure and analysis, investment can be a tool to address these inequities.

Outline

• The guide begins with defining the central concepts that inform an LGBTQI lens. It could break out into three constituent elements: sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.
• The next chapter focuses on asset owners and investors and lays out a set of strategies for them to actively engage to build a portfolio with an LGBTQI lens.
• In support of these strategies, the fourth chapter lays out the current opportunities to invest with an LGBTQI Lens, the fifth chapter details an approach to bring an LGBTQI lens to evaluating investment risk, and the sixth chapter examines approaches to data and metrics that support an LGBTQI lens.
• Finally, we set out actions needed for investors, activists, and funders to build out the necessary ecosystem in the final chapter, A Roadmap to the Future of Investing with an LGBTQI Lens.

Defining an LGBTQI lens is essential for understanding: An LGBTQI lens needs to be rooted in understanding norms, expectations, and power, not a single framework or set of terms.

All approaches to socially responsible investing rely on the power of the individual or institution that owns the asset to use their power and privilege to demand the investment strategies and products that they want. This guide includes tools for investors to design an investment strategy with an LGBTQI lens and approaches to actively engage with investment advisors and managers to ensure their investments align with their strategy.

Incorporating LGBTQI lenses will enable investors to uncover new investment opportunities that provide compelling returns while also having a positive impact on challenges facing LGBTQI communities. The three main lenses for opportunity includes:

• Access to capital. Marginalised populations tend to have less access to capital and credit, at an individual and business level.

• Workplace equity. This opportunity relates to how workplaces treat marginalised workers, from protections to responsive policies to representation in leadership.

• Products and services. Which products and services directly address the needs of or benefit the populations in question?

It is worth mentioning that existing data and metrics to support an LGBTQI lens are deemed insufficient. Also, no shift in investments has ever happened without the power of asset holders to advocate for what they want. Asset holders can use their power to disrupt systems of power.

This guide describes the ideas, activities, people, and organisations who can participate in building a parallel investing field that achieves true equality for people of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and gender expressions.

1. This guide sets out a theoretical grounding demonstrating why LGBTQI lens is germane to investment decision making and providing the tools needed to conduct financial analyses. Investors currently investing with a gender lens would benefit from the integration of an LGBTQI lens to achieve their desired investment goals and their gender equality outcomes.
   
2. Integrating an LGBTQI lens into the systems and structures of finance will require that a set of individual wealth holders and institutional investors use their power to disrupt the current practices and analytical frameworks in the field of gender lens investing, and sustainable investing more broadly.
3. List of investment terms:
   Using majority or minority voting rights to protect LGBTQI outcomes.
   Creating longer term lengths for individuals and businesses in demand.
   Defining the uses of capital to ensure that investment capital cannot be used to discriminate against LGBTQI groups.
   Linking interest rates to social goals, or giving investees concessions if they achieve certain goals.
   Majority investors can use drag-along rights to force other investors to divest of companies that were found to be discriminating against or harming LGBTQI individuals or communities.
   
4. It is significant and meaningful to build an activist investor community. Investors who are using their power to disrupt systems of inequity are the greatest. Within the emerging field of LGBTQI investing there is opportunity for both standards around issues such as discrimination in the workplace, and broader signalling campaigns that establish an LGBTQI lens as material to investment decisions.
5. 1/3 major components of a field defined by Criterion:
   - A set of ideas such as common language, frameworks and modes of analysis that guide investment decision-making. We need to reframe our understanding of gender expression, gender identity, and sexual orientation within the field of gender lens investing. Also, there is very limited research and data in this field, need investors to funding the research.
6. 2/3 major components of a field defined by Criterion:
   - A set of activity such as the supply of, demand for, and measurement of investment opportunities. A named and recognised field is essential for the collaborative design of products and demonstrations that make the case to a broader audience that the issue is salient and can be addressed within the practices of finance.
7. 3/3 major components of a field defined by Criterion:
   - A set of people and organisations who identify as having shared goals and contribute to learning, training, and providing authority to the field. Conversations and convenings focused on an LGBTQI lens would build networks among people across sectors who may be working on similar issues but not interacting or seeing each other as resources.
8. While LGBTQI issues overlap with the issues gender lens investing seeks to address, a parallel LGBTQI lens field is required to provide a common understanding of best practices, amplification of the case for a LGBTQI lens, and coordinated effort to drive the development of new investment products and strategies across asset classes.
9. Both upgrading the existing field of gender lens investing and building a more powerful ecosystem of LGBTQI investors will require philanthropists and investors use their resources and exercise their influence to build and shape both fields.