Welcome, everyone. This is our last session before drinks and camaraderie outside, but we've got a really critical topic that we're going to dive into. We do want to ask, for those of you that are just one or two at your table, would you mind moving over to another table because we'd like to create some good robust dialogue as we get into this? So if you wouldn't mind just joining another table, that would be terrific. Thank you. Perfect. So I'm Aisha Khanna. I lead Care Enterprises. And Care Enterprises serves as the impact investment arm of the international NGO called Care. And I'm really excited to be here with our fabulous partner. So Tia, if you would introduce yourself. Yes, thank you, everyone, so much for coming. My name is Tia Subramanian. And I lead the Gender-Based Violence Program at Criterion Institute, which is a global think tank that's focused on shifting how power works in finance. And yeah. And so we both have developed tools that we're going to be able to dig into today and talk to you about our frameworks and are really excited to get your feedback and your engagement. So Tia, maybe if we want to talk about what the goals are for our session today. Yes. OK, let me. OK, amazing. So we have two goals for the session. One is to kind of think about how to kind of reframe how we think about gender analysis and really ground it in kind of power and inclusion framework. And the second is to start to learn about practical ways to apply tools, analysis, processes that look at both shifting internal practices and how investors work with portfolio companies to get to that kind of more transformative gender impact. And if you wouldn't mind sharing the agenda. So this is the way that we're going to plan our time together. We have a little bit over an hour. It's going to be fast paced. We're going to immerse you in a little bit of frameworks and theory, but then really dive in so that you can experience the tools and dig in a little bit into the tools. So we are going to have some polls throughout our time together. So we want to survey participants. It's going to help inform our content and how we approach our session together. And then we're going to start off with criterion, sharing their deep expertise. And we'll have a chance at the table to work through that. And then Care Enterprises will have a chance to share our little theory and tools as well. So interactive, right? Yes, lots of energy. Yes, interactive, informal. We want people to be talking. We'll be asking for some feedback, kind of written feedback on some of the worksheets. If something doesn't make sense at all, we want that feedback. So our tool, definitely the tool that we'll be working on, the criterion's tool, is kind of a work in progress. So we are using you all as data and giddy pigs. So yeah. Yeah, same with Care. Care is putting this in place in the ground with Care teams in Indonesia and Vietnam and Cambodia and Bangladesh, but it's evolving, right? And so we want to have your feedback as practitioners, as founders, as investors. And these tools will continue to evolve. I do just want to say that Caroline, where are you? Yes, Sturman is here from Care and Partner with Care Resource Development. And Tia, you've got some. Yes, and my colleagues, Melanie and Arianna, are there. And we'll be jumping in a couple of times and also can help answer any questions. And maybe as we're doing the table exercises, people can walk around and see if there are any questions. So great. Well, I think we're going to dive in. Let's dive in. So maybe slides, please. So we're going to do a couple of quick, informal polls. And I think we'll just do a show of hands. Or should we have people stand for this one? Sure, let's stand. OK, we'll do a quick sit. OK, Arianna, over to you. If you identify with or allocator, you might now on, Arianna. Oh, great. Thank you. Give me a second. Just take a minute to stand so we have a sense of the room if you don't mind, so allocator investors. Make eye contact with someone you haven't met. Great. Thank you. If you identify as a researcher or a program on the program side of things, please stand. Oh, great. Excellent. Interesting. Thank you. And if you identify as something other than those two categories, we welcome you to stand. Thank you. Yeah. All right, I get to ask the second question. If it's not there, I'm just going to read through all the options. And then as I, OK, there we go. OK, so if someone asked you to integrate a gender lens into a design process, whether for a fund, an investment, or a program, how confident would you feel? No clue? Nervous? Ah, please stand up. And we can own this. Awesome. Amazing. Oh, yes. Way to go. There we go. That's what this session is for. Yeah, that's what this session is for. All right. How about I could do this not perfectly, but I probably could. Anybody in that category? Amazing. Awesome. Great. All right. And how about I live and breathe gender analysis? Thank you. That's so helpful. Back to you, ladies. Thank you. OK, thank you, everyone. That's really interesting. So let's, if we can just go to the first slide, please, for the next slide. OK, so a lot of the session is going to focus on looking at specific tools and ways to implement processes. But I wanted to start my part of this session by just looking at a couple of, talking about a couple of reframes in how we approach gender analysis. And the first one being, we'll talk a little bit more about this, but gender lens investing has really largely focused on a practice that's just sort of, it relies on counting the numbers of women and girls, or sort of pure representation. It's also kind of traditionally been grounded in a really kind of binary understanding of gender. And so we want to shift away from that. Neither of those things, kind of counting the number of women and girls somewhere, or understanding gender as binary is really representative of how gender dynamics play out in the world. And so as I said earlier, criterion is really focused on shifting how power works in finance, how people on the social change side use finance to kind of use finance as a tool to further their work. So all of our work is grounded in kind of understanding and analyzing power as it relates to different types of dynamics. So we'll talk a little bit more about this, but the first one is really to shift from this kind of counting frame to a deeper valuing of gendered experience in the investment process. And then the second thing that we'll be talking about is there are many ways to do complex gender analyses. But traditionally, when investment has, when kind of the investment community has focused on kind of changing something about the way that you approach investing, it's really, it tends to focus a lot on, well, let's look at, let's focus on the outcomes, let's track outcomes, let's focus on investing companies and less of a focus on the internal processes and how you're shifting those things at a deeper level. So the second part of this conversation is gonna look at ways that we can, that as investors we can really think about how you do a power analysis in your own internal processes and practices and structure. So next, oh, next slide please, earth slide. So, all right, okay, okay, great, thank you. So to start by just talking about how we are, what we mean by gender and gender analysis.  And I think it's really important to understand all of that, the kind of role that norms and behaviors and roles play with how those characteristics sort of play out in the world and how kind of different groups and individuals have power or don't have power because of how those kind of identities and perceived and real are playing out in any given context. And because these are socially constructed, they change over time, they're constantly in flux and how different groups sort of have access to opportunity or not or disenfranchised or discriminated against is something, is a kind of constantly shifting equation. And the reason that that is important is because any kind of gender analysis, any kind of gender analysis, even outside of the investment process, really one that actually gets at what is playing out in the ground is a kind of dynamic process that goes beyond this counting frame that we've often used in finance and really asks questions about differences and power in local contexts in the markets in which you're investing. And so an example of that that's been coming up a lot, so I don't know how many people are working on these kinds of issues, but there's a lot of attention right now in investing in the care economy. And the care economy tends to be a very gendered thing. Unpaid care work tends to primarily be taken on by women or girls in various parts of the world. And I've been on calls with different people who were thinking about how you design investment opportunities related to the care economy. And in some countries and in some regions, you have activists and researchers saying, the thing that you really, the thing that investments need to do here is to increase the amount that people are paid and needs to kind of, whether or not it's formalized, you just need to increase the amount that it's paid. Whereas in other countries you have people saying, or in other just regional contexts, people saying, we need investments that fundamentally disrupt who is doing care work, who wants to do care work, who is sort of compelled to do care work, right? So one is a kind of the thing that's happening is kind in many ways, okay it needs to be valued differently and the other is a kind of really, we need something that just entirely disrupts how people feel that they need to engage in this. And those are very different, I mean those are very different from an investment point of view, that's a very different design process, right? Those are very different conceptions of how you shift power in a society and how you shift power in a sector. And so that's just, it's you, and so this is why kind of paying, you're needing to understand those kinds of dynamics is kind of critical when you make designing investments or you will be designing investments that either just aren't effective or can have negative consequences and just aren't grounded in how those dynamics play out in the ground. So, and if we can go to the next slide please. So the kind of, and the kind of gender analysis I'm talking about is, you know, I think relevant to a wide range of investors, not just people who are really focused on sort of gender lens investments, but we, the kind of doing this deeper analysis is relevant for multiple different kinds of investors. So there's the impact frame where you're targeting populations that are marginalized by gendered imbalances of power. There's the opportunity frame where incorporating a gender analysis can sort of unlock a different kind of value. So kind of the classic example of that is, well, there's a business case for investing in companies with women employees. We know they perform better. That's the kind of bare bones opportunity frame. And then the risk frame where incorporating a gender analysis into kind of core investment analysis can expose hidden investment risks. And I think the best example or a good example of that risk frame is gender-based violence, which criterion works on a lot. And so our work on gender-based violence is really focused on, is understanding gender as gender-based violence as grounded in kind of deeper cultural norms and behaviors and understanding violence as the sort of ultimate enforcer of norms and behaviors that people in power want to ensure remain a certain way. And so an example of why that kind of gets you to, can get you to hidden risks, it's an example of supply chains. So a lot of people are starting to look at supply chains in their investments and kind of look at, just look at what's going on in the supply chain. And not doing a gender analysis when you're looking at your supply frame or even just doing one that's sort of counting, that's a kind of bear counting women or we want to economically empower women, let's say, you can have a supply chain that has 40, 50, 60, 80% women in it. If the costs of being a part of that supply chain are exploitation, which happens really often, that's something that you'll miss if you're just doing a kind of pure raw numbers analysis. And it's sort of no matter what kind of investor you are, it's not going to get you to where you want to be, it's sort of from an impact point of view, it's furthering exploitation from a risk point of view, it's exposing your investments to instability, it's exposing them to regulatory and reputational risk. So yeah, so this is basically why this kind of investment, this kind of analysis can really be relevant to the kind of spectrum of investments regardless of your goals and needs to be kind of tailored to your market context. So, okay, so shifting to this kind of power analysis, the power analysis piece and how you actually implement a power analysis. So the kind of gender analysis that I've been talking about that's grounded in sort of understanding power dynamics is there are many different ways to kind of approach it and it does require different kinds of expertise. And as I said earlier, one of the things that Criterion really focuses on is looking at, is asking investors to, is kind of saying to investors, if you want to be really having a kind of shift, understanding how power is working and grounding your approaches and shifting power, that can't start with just a checkbox and your diligence criteria, it's got to start with embedding that kind of lens and shifting whose expertise is valued, whose voice is heard, kind of throughout the internal, the investee structure and investment process, which to kind of, to incorporate these different kinds of expertise and analysis and ultimately get to better outcomes. So we're going to shift to an exercise. I'm just looking at this. So these seven questions that you see here up on the slide, this is a framework that Criterion's developed for essentially doing a power analysis and these questions specifically are, they can certainly be applied to looking at the investee level and Aisha's going to talk a little bit more about that part of the practice, but we have been working on kind of implementing these as part of organizational investee self-assessment and just thinking about these different power dynamics in each step of how you set up an organization and how you create an investment practice and just seeing there, we're kind of developing tools that get at the specifics of this, but these are the seven principles. So whose knowledge is valued, what's considered expertise and what's not, who is seen as worthy of access to capital and resources, who decides, who makes decisions, whose timeframe matters. There are a lot of, there's a lot of conventional wisdom and investments about what, by what time you're supposed to see what kind of returns and that's often just not matched, it's not matching capital to needs very well. Who gets to know what and when? Who's taking what risk and who is incentivized to do what? And so the exercise that we want to do, and so then the things up at the top that we have broken out and this is a kind of extensive tool that Criterion is developing and I haven't given you the kind of really the kind of full part of the tool because it's kind of very detailed, but we've broken up the sort of internal piece into three parts, into governance and strategy, management and operations and the actual investment process and on your desks you all have a handout that looks, that breaks down each of those three. It's the one that has, it's the one that looks like a PowerPoint slide but on half a page, it's got colors, so yeah, yeah, so and it's stapled together. Ariana's showing everyone what that is, yeah. So that breaks out, that sort of breaks out these, the different parts of the whole internal process and what we are, so as I said, this is part of a tool that we're developing and under each of these buckets we're going, there's a kind of series of questions and indicators that organizations can use to sort of assess where they are in doing that power analysis on their own organizational practices but what we thought we would do today is just have people look at those three parts of your, those three slides that look at governance operations, strategy and investment process and reflect on the power dynamics questions that you have and if we could have this, yeah. So as you look at those three things, just reflecting on where in those, where in those organizational structures or the investment process are you most aware of power and privilege and bias and where in those parts, do you feel that you could do something to shift power dynamics in terms of who has decision making power, whose expertise is valued and this can be towards something that you yourself are working on. So this is the one that, the tool that this tool that we're working on is specifically about gender-based violence and so the kind of components and questions that we have under each are related to that kind of, to that issue but this is really applicable kind of across any issue of kind of equity and justice. So yeah, so thinking about what's there, is there something that's missing, is there something that does not seem like it's in the right place and where in those things do you see an opportunity to shift power dynamics in some way and we'll ask that if people can please write on those sheets so kind of huddle and tables reflect right, we'll give you a few moments and we'll collect the sheet at the ends but we're not gonna do a report out or anything, we just kind of want people to reflect and we'll do that for about 10 minutes and yeah, and we'll walk around. Yes, oh yeah. It's the ones that are stapled together so that's just a repeat of the slide that we had, those are the questions, yeah. So invest or, yeah, this is the one, yeah. You're looking at these and reflecting on those questions on the other side so yeah, looking at these questions in relation to each of these different parts of an investor company. I work for Acumen, we make a wide range of impact investing investments but I specifically work in agriculture, we use a lean data surveying technique to ensure that the good or service that the company's providing is indeed impacting, in my case the smallholder farmer community, we find that the majority of the time, the person who picks up the phone or responds to the survey is a man overwhelmingly and that their opinion and perspective is centered when we know that women and female farmers are primarily doing the work and the marketing of the product at the same point. So we have an issue with our surveying in the sense that it's who controls the communication coming out of the family unit in the home that skews our survey results in certain ways so we know that there's something on back there. Frustration and it's at the due diligence phase, I would call it of the overall process document. Yeah, I mean that's one of the kind of big problems in data collection for gender, for any issue in which you have kind of imbalances of power and kind of access to who is sharing that information who gets to kind of tell that story always comes up. And I do think that's where, that's one of the ways in which you can think about, and not necessarily you all, I don't know how you were doing it, but thinking about that fix doesn't happen at the level of what is the question we're asking, that fix happens at the level of, do we have someone kind of who is designing our sort of fundamental approach to this work who understands what those deep dynamics are on the ground and might know what research is out there to kind of counter whatever narratives are being given via certain questions or how you can approach asking questions in a way that doesn't threaten patriarchal power in that way and therefore you get more kind of more accurate answers. But yeah, it gets at the difficulty of needing to translate really deep kind of, really deep kind of sociological cultural research into how you design a company or investment approach. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Any other examples? Any other thoughts? I heard so many great conversations at all those tables. Oh, please. We can cure a little bit. Let's get you to apparently the, yeah, sound is that. She has the mic right here. Thank you. Well, we like so many other folks looked at all the blue columns and basically says everywhere in here there could be change. We talked about training that's needed for investors sort of that culture shift, but then also talked about the pipeline even leading up to that, like looking at business school, looking at sort of high school programs or internship or mentorship programs that there's just, we just need more folks of diverse gender identities and gender diversity in these sectors. Really, I believe to build a critical mass of folks and create a wave of culture change. Yeah, thank you. Completely agree. And that's again why you can't start at the end of the process, right? You have to start at like before the beginning to really get at a real actual diversity of views and expertise. Anybody, we have time for one more. One more. Be shy. I'm sure many people in this room share this opinion, but I think power and bias and privilege shows up strongly in the impact measurement side of things. Who gets to decide what is measured? How do you interpret that data? Who owns the data? There's so much there. So yeah, that goes through my head all the time. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yes, and the question of kind of what are you collecting? How are you interpreting it? It's really fraught also when you're talking about marginalized populations and sort of what counts as a good impact and what doesn't. I think microfinance is a great example where for so long that a lot of the impact measurement and that is like, oh, we reached X number of women, but have you looked at, for example, there were a lot of repercussions to how people designed women's economic empowerment programs including kind of optics and violence and things like that because people hadn't gotten at the underlying cultural and social norms that were disrupted and how, right, how do you have a measurement process that captures better data? I think, again, it gets to needing to have that kind of expertise at the very beginning of the design of everything that you're doing. Yeah, oh yeah, please. I think maybe one more. Hi, I'm Victoria. I represent a fund that we invest in women-led companies and just more than an additional point, I really wanna say I totally agree with you and compliment what you're saying in the way that things are measured and how it increases the bias. So for example, we had a case once where we were going to invest in a company that presented itself as promoting positive gender practices, right? That's the reason why we were kinda gonna invest in them because they were working with X amount of women. And so what happened is when we got to the due diligence phase and we started investigating those practices and their working conditions and the way they paid, how much they paid women, et cetera, what really was happening is kind of modern slavery. They were taking advantage of the women. What they were presenting as, ah, we work with a lot of women, so we're gender-based company was them taking advantage of them. So just to reinforce your point and how important it is to look beyond just how many women are you working with? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Thank you. How are we doing on time? Okay, one very quick last comment and then we'll jump to the next sectionary. This is about eating the own dog food. How many of the funds are insisting having own ethics reporting policies or frameworks? So whether they do have any good whistleblower policies defined for their own employees of those funds report to the top management about any diversity, equity, inclusion issues and whether they are also percolating the same thing to their portfolio companies. This is a big topic where the ethics reporting or governance issues around this whistleblowing is still an open area. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, agreed. And that's why just focusing on the, what's my diligence does not get at the, has to start with things like governance and there's not a lot of consistency with it. So all right, well thank you all so much. We're gonna shift to the second part which is now talking about how you sort of implement these kinds of a gender analysis when you in the kind of, at the investing company level. So should we, I should do, should we, do we wanna jump to? Oh, maybe before we dive into the second section. So, Ariana, do you wanna kick us off? And I think we'll ask you just to raise your hands this time and then the question is when you currently are thinking about gender analysis in investments, do you think about it primarily from? Highly done. Risk is one. The second category, here we go, is impact opportunity or both. So I'll have folks who primarily think about gender analysis in terms of risk. Please raise your hand. Oh, Justin. Wow. Those who are thinking in terms of impact and or opportunity, yeah. Here we are at Socap. And everyone who's thinking about both. Okay. Very interesting. All right. Thank you. All right, can we hand it over? Thank you. It makes sense, right? To be thinking about both opportunity and impact and risk and how that might come together. So again, I'm Aisha Khanna. I lead the impact investment arm of CARE. CARE is a 75 year old international humanitarian and development organization in 100 countries around the world and has been focusing on women's economic empowerment over the last 20 years or so and increasingly at CARE we have recognized that we need more market based approaches. So we're launching blended finance, deep gender and climate impact funds in areas where CARE has a footprint. So working with CARE gender experts on the ground but raising impact funds that finance women owned businesses but also go deep across the value chain. So that's what we're gonna talk about in the second half of this conversation that we're having today. So we're moving from the broader topic of power to talk more specifically about gender and we're moving from talking about a focus on internal investment processes to applying these processes externally to your portfolios or to businesses. So the goal of this next exercise and the work that we're doing at CARE Enterprises is to help you as investors but also the founders, the entrepreneurs in the room to identify and address gender inequities at the investment level. So the impact of gender lens investing has often been framed in terms of representation and the number of women in leadership. And as you've heard from Tia, the root causes of power and gender inequities go much deeper than representation. And we had the conversation earlier in the plenary about ESG and checking the box on women founders as one way and not an in-depth way to evaluate gender transformation and gender equity. So we believe that we need to explore where investee businesses have systemic discrimination or exclusion or even instances of harassment and violence and that is hindering their process and we wanna help work with them to develop solutions. We believe that if our investments are addressing root causes and power differentials that we're gonna be much more likely to create meaningful, measurable, long lasting impact. So at Care Enterprises, we've developed a series of tools that help us ask the deeper questions about gender inequities at the level of the investing companies. And we just wanted to share some of the tools with you today. We're gonna have a chance to dig into them. We really wanna welcome your feedback and reflection on how to apply the set of tools to investees in your portfolios or if you're an entrepreneur and founder, how do you apply it to your own processes as a business? So I just wanna talk about the framework for identifying gender equity risks and finding solutions to gender inequities within an investee business model. Our framework is aligned with the 2x Gender Challenge that's a framework adopted by 15 countries, including the US. It's a high-level emerging standard around the world, but it's a relatively high-level framework. So our tool is bringing it down to the next level so that you can actually use it to assess your portfolio and businesses can use it. So this model is where we use this to work with companies to explore their strengths or their gaps in their business models with regard to gender equity. So you see this, you should have a copy of this on your table, our framework. You can see that we have five key opportunities or solution areas. So it includes everything from the voice of key stakeholders, to policies, to operations, to corporate culture, and our belief is that incorporating solutions at each of these levels is going to be much more likely to result in sustained positive impact in gender equity. CARE also provides technical assistance to work side by side with the businesses as a supplement to our Impact Fund. So we're not just giving this to businesses and hoping that they might be able to use this tool. We're actually working with them, sharing policies and practices, putting in place disaggregated data collection, and then working with them over the course of their loan since we are launching debt funds. And so we're doing financing. But we wanted to give you a little taste in our living time. So we've developed a table exercise that's focused on the first area of solutions, which is voice. I'm happy to answer questions, other questions that you have about some of these other topics, but let's dig into voice of stakeholders. So there are tangible bottom line benefits and competitive advantages from truly understanding the views of key stakeholders. So whether we're talking about employees or customers or others such as supply chain partners, but voice has no value unless the company is actually listening and incorporating the input. So we believe that helping a company listen more carefully to its stakeholders can be a game changer, both for financial and social impact. So we ask our investing companies how they listen to women and other key stakeholders about gender discrimination, bias or violence within the investor's business models and find solutions that work within the business models. So you'll see we've listed a couple examples of listening mechanisms used to speak with women and other stakeholders about their concerns. Focus group discussions, surveys, customer service help desk, having members from affinity groups that are advisory committees for companies and care has decades of experience developing these listening mechanisms with companies and with employees and they've shown to have significant success both for the company's efficiency and effectiveness and benefits for the employees. So we have studied over decades and shown that these kinds of methodologies produce better products and services that are better meeting customer needs, they improve employee satisfaction and retention and of course they reduce incidences of sexual harassment and violence within the workplace. So it's just a good business to incorporate these kinds of metrics and we hope that the broader field will incorporate these kinds of metrics as part of the assessment of investments that are made. So this is what we would love for you to do in the next 10 minutes or so. We're gonna ask you to explore how an investor might work with an investing business to address gender inequities in their business model and workplace and we've developed a set of questions that brings to life the more detailed methodology that we use with companies. But we'd like to encourage each table to work with this worksheet and consider a real investment opportunity. So we want someone from each table to think about a business that you're doing diligence on, that is part of the process, that you're trying to make a decision about an investment. So come up with an actual case example and then the table's gonna use that case example and dig deep into voice. So you wanna start thinking about that. What are some examples of a company that you wanna use as a case study at your table? And then we wanna ask you to work through the questions in this worksheet. So you'll see there is a detailed set of steps that we work through. We just want you to go through steps one and two and write on the worksheet. And if someone can agree to be ascribed for the table, take notes as you're discussing and you're basically working the case of that investing company and you're thinking about what mechanisms do they currently have in place? What are some ideas about new ways that we can encourage them to listen more carefully to all of their stakeholders? Who are their stakeholders? So that step one and two starts to immerse you in thinking about how can we help support businesses in our portfolios to actually deepen measurable impact using voice as one of the areas of a solution. So if you can pick an investing company, if someone can agree to be ascribed, we wanna ask you for the next five, six minutes or so, just dive in, work through the worksheet, answer the questions and then we are gonna ask some of the tables just to report out so we can hear about some of the different ways you've thought about this, different kinds of solutions that you as investors, you're wearing your investor hat, can make and implement with your portfolio of businesses. Take the next few minutes or so, pick a case study, dive in, we'll be walking around to answer questions. Hi, my name's Aisha too. I work at an organization called Impact Transfans. And, oh yeah, same Z's twinsies. So just to give the ground floor for what we're talking about, we are a criminal justice organization. We're starting this new project called Growing Justice. We're putting vertical farms inside of a women's prison in California, chasing the women inside of the prison how to grow the food in there. The food will go to the people in prison, as you can imagine, there's a nutrition issue inside of prison. And then a workforce development arm that's being created in that we are teaching them how to grow the vertical farms when they leave prison, hook them up with jobs, plenty and lots of other organizations that are doing vertical farming in the United States. So clearly it's like at a gender specific prison that was purposely done by our choice by ours. But quite the conversation we had here is that we're not investors, clearly. We are the investee about what would be some of the obstacles that an investor would see in, oh wow, got word, an investor, right, an investor, they would see as the obstacle in that. Clearly one of those obstacles is that we are in a prison and there are a lot of things that we cannot control around some of that. So, let's talk about now. Like what else we talked about? Highlights, okay. So at the table we have some people that are actual investors and so the things that we were being asked are things like, okay, so if there's an issue with the women inside of the prison that they need to talk about, who do they go to and how they ensure that there's not retaliation, clearly like prison within its structure is terrible. So how do they prevent retaliation? So we had a decent answer for that which is the prison actually, they wouldn't let us in. Like they had their choice to let us in and do the project. So that's like one piece to already say that they want us there in some way. The second thing we talked about was that we did like, for lack of better word, like a focus group inside of the prison. So they like knew who we were and talked about that the fact that they wanted something like this. And then like the prison actually provided a little bit of funding for us to do it. So it's a way to like mitigate some of that. What else did we talk about? The other thing we spoke, okay, I'm gonna start. Hi, I'm Miranda. Nice to meet you all. The other thing we talked about is how to incentivize the prison, whatever, whether it's the warden or the guards or the whole institution to have it be a success. So what incentive do they have? Maybe that could be just like any other company like a PR campaign, so that they, or meeting the metrics of the state, some of the funding's coming from the state. So there may be some state oversight to try and incentivize that. And I think there was one other thing we were talking about. Well, what a great example, right? I think that was our... Of constraints that are in place and how to really think creatively about voice in an institution that is repressing that voice and how to be creative and come up with some solutions. So that's a really great example and how challenging it is and how specific we need to be as we think about different business verticals and different business models. So thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Other ideas, other things that bubbled up? Yeah, please. So I'd like to provide an example of how we have been incentivizing our portfolio companies at Viola to implement gender practices, right? And inclusive gender practices, sorry. So last year we launched our first pay for impact loan. Let me explain. The way this worked was when we decided to invest in a company, step number one, we would do an initial evaluation of how inclusive, how gender inclusive is that company to begin with, right? Step number two, we would provide them with an action plan over the term of the loan, which is typically three years, with specific targets to meet, right? So they had to raise awareness with all of their thousand employees about discrimination and gender, et cetera. They had to create tangible mechanisms within the company to promote gender inclusion. So that might be, I don't know, create a diversity board, change their hiring practices, look at their supply chain, et cetera. And number three, start measuring and making sure that they keep using those mechanisms. And if they meet those objectives, because it's a blended instrument that brings together both philanthropic and private capital, they can, the interest rate can drop up to 15 points in Mexican pesos. And so far it has worked really great. So we hope that there's a way. Fantastic and tying incentives directly to your metrics. And, oh, sorry, I think I left the clicker down there. Would you mind going to, sorry, to the, you really, and you went really went across the five different categories that we had. So you sort of shared, you were getting into operations, supply chain and being very comprehensive. So I think that's a really good example of how to think across these various categories and put an intentional comprehensive plan in place and then continue to evolve, right? And see what's bubbling up. That's great, thank you for sharing. Any other, any other, yes, please. These are great because it brings to life how the specificity of what an intention that we wanna be working with as we do deep gender impact. Yeah, please. Yeah, so hi everybody. My company Story LOP. We build software to be your lawyer friend and general counsel, even know what that means. And then when you need a lawyer, we will refer you out to an alliance of female and minority legal practitioners that we've specifically recruited to help our clients. So one of our core principles is designing by the historically underrepresented for them. Our CTO is a citizen of Mexico who speaks English for the second language, goes through all of the design presentations that we make. We've got them so they can be easily translated into any other language and that they're understandable to someone who speaks English as a second language. We do active questions during team meetings. So it's not anybody have questions. It's Delia, will you ask me a question? Christine, will you ask me a question? So actively inviting people, letting them know their opinions are valuable. The same thing with our attorney alliance. We do quarterly check-ins with all of our allies and say, what do you need to make your practice better?  And through that, we're getting a lot of insights on things that we would have never thought of ourselves that are actually helpful to a much larger community of folks. So there's an active listening component and a sort of intentional design thinking component to bringing in the opinions of people who are not like the owner, let's say. Yeah. Thank you. And thank you for also the tie that we had in the first half with the Criterion Institute and the second half linking what you're doing as an investor and looking at your own practices, your own diversity practices and what voice is represented and then linking that to your portfolio and being very intentional about that. So that's a great example of both internal and external alignment. Yeah, please. Let's do one more, I think. Okay. Okay, hello, everybody. My name is Cesar, in English is Cesar, like Cesar Salad. So you can know how to pronounce it. So we have a couple of comments on the framework. And this time we don't bring solutions, but some issues to share, let's see. Yeah, please. One thing we noted is that the focus here is more on gender discrimination bias and violence and harassment. So we think that gender equality goes a bit more, goes beyond that, right? And I think this is more like a risk approach, which is bestie, but we are thinking that a more opportunistic approach may have. Can you share some examples of that? Because that's great. What would be some examples that you would add that would be more about the opportunity and not as much the risk? Yeah, sure. We'll be on book, for example, about creating new types of jobs within the company. We're changing the- Inclusive jobs, yep. These kind of things, where we only not see men and women in a fixed position, but in a different way. Some creativity on that side. Otherwise it goes a lot about violence, harassment, discrimination. So it's like trying to protect ourselves or everybody, so that's a bit common. The second one is also goes related to that, is about how do you measure or know about that? So it's because this is very private issues. I think if somebody goes to the door of any of us asking, tell me about sexual harassment, nobody will be maybe open to talk about that. So that may be a bit difficult for a company to identify and then measure that, to say, to identify in this framework, to see when that really happens and how can you trust that information on getting. And the third one, we see that a lot of focus on women. So within gender qualities goes about men, women, other genders. And here is more about have you asked questions about boys of women and other stakeholders, we think that we have to also ask about men and other genders to have the picture. Yeah, so these are, so sorry for this comment. No, thank you so much. I think that's exactly what we want to hear. We're gonna get your specific comments before you leave just to make sure we have your sheet. And I think that's such an important point that pay equity supports all workers. So when you're focused on women having pay equity, it impacts all workers and that's what's critical. It doesn't just impact women. And it's interesting the point that you're raising. I think it's a really important one about privacy issues and sharing that information. And I think as more and more businesses recognize that it's a risk to not address these issues because it impacts productivity, work culture, absenteeism. They are being more creative and more open to tracking incidences, having processes in place around accountability. So there are ways to get around the privacy issues and companies are beginning to put those in place. And we think that's a healthy process and I've been working with them, but you're exactly right. There are a lot of stigma and a lot of barriers to prevent companies from wanting to be open about these issues, as we know. And many of us unfortunately have experienced. Well, unfortunately we don't have enough time to go into all the discussions, but hopefully you had some new insights and were able to dig in, had some thank you for the reflections and how to push and continue to go even further. And I think we wanna wrap up with one last poll. So I might turn it over to you. Okay, I get to ask the last poll. So we just wanna do a bit of a temperature check to see how valuable the session was for you today. You can also agree with all of these statements. So I could ask you to raise your hand when I read the statement that applies to you. So this workshop has led me to think differently about the relationship between gender analysis and investment outcomes. Is that a, anybody? Awesome. This workshop has expanded my sense of concrete ways to implement a gender analysis. Great. And I'm still processing. Awesome, that's great, thank you. Tia said, so thank you so much. We hope that you took away the combination of theory and a little bit of application. It's a little messy, what we did, these are evolving frameworks. So we're looking for continued feedback. Tia, anything else you wanna add, of course? Okay, it's on now. Yeah, I would just add that if people are still processing and have questions, please reach out to us as you look to, I don't think more about these things. Implement them in your own practices. Think about how you engage with investors in kind of shifting some of these dynamics. And we would just, yeah, we would love to hear any feedback. Thank you all so much. Yeah, criterion and care are on this journey and are gonna be on this journey for a long time and we just are so hopeful about what we can accomplish together and what we can learn together. So thank you so much.


into our next talk, which is on Bitcoin Monero atomic swaps. I know this is a very hot level of research going on recently. There's a ton of interest. So ZK AO. Okay, you got the screen share going here. Hi. Can you hear me? We can hear you.  How about that? Oh, yeah. So basically, I would like to do it more interactively. So very welcome to ask questions or ask questions that people drop on the chat. So basically, in 2017, we were in CCC and we were discussing and we found it would be very interesting to create a project to swap Bitcoin for Monero in a trustless manner, atomically. And after a week, it was just for the, because it sounded very, very interesting and my colleague Hashed couldn't get his head out of that. And we ended up working on this project much more than we initially expected. So one of the things that cryptocurrencies bring is like this permissionless way of exchanging money online, for example, on the internet. And before, like all the electronic money was intermediated. Can you actually see my screen? Yes, I can see your screen. Yes. All right. And there is an issue with this because we have cash in society and cash is a bearer, peer-to-peer, permissionless and privacy-preserving form of money. And who has it can spend it, has the right to spend it. By having physical possession, peer-to-peer, you can just meet someone and give it to this person directly. If it's peer-to-peer, it's also permissionless. Nobody is on the way to intercept this transaction. And privacy-preserving, you can be locked in a room, give cash to someone and nobody else needs to know about it. And cash is legal. So we should not downgrade our online money by using or accepting a totally transparent financial system like Bitcoin. We have to have ways to be able to exercise privacy by, for example, swapping Bitcoin into Monero and going into the some private world. But you should do that in a permissionless manner. Like you should not ask permission to go private. So it looks like from this definition of cash, Monero is cash and Bitcoin is almost. Bitcoin has this property of permissionless. So you could spend your money in the wrong way and nobody could prevent you from doing that. However, because it's not privacy-preserving, people can watch you, what you're doing with your money and they might go after you because of that. So this is very problematic in an open society. So the way we see Atomic Swaps is more like a cash-to-cash exchange. So you have euros and you meet someone who has US dollar, you agree on an exchange rate and you exchange it in private. Nobody else needs to get involved in this exchange. Only the people in the exchange. And we think that Atomic Swaps, they are very similar to this, so it's a cash-to-cash exchange. And in the same way that you wouldn't want to, if someone tries to buy your moto for $2,000, you might take cash and not worry too much about it. But if you are trying to sell your house and somebody shows up with a million in cash, you are going to worry about it because you would want to know where it came from and if it's not counterfeit. So there is this natural tendency of people to judge the quality of what they're getting in an exchange. So in the grip of the space, now people are responsible for keeping taking care of their private keys. They could also be responsible for not engaging into suspicious looking transactions. Like if a transaction is too good to be true, it's probably not true. So one thing that Monero would gain, so Bitcoin users for sure would gain a lot of privacy by being able to switch to Monero in a trustless and permissionless manner. But what Monero gains from Bitcoin is its liquidity. It has like 100 times higher market cap and it's much more easily accessible. So Bitcoin is easy to get and if you have a network that you can get Monero, exchange Monero atomically, then you could go into Monero for that path. So it's very interesting to have permission as entry into privacy currency. It's not nice to have to ask for permission to go private. So with this I'm going to go and I'm going to try to go through the protocol in the form of a diagram. So here first I'm going to show this is the complete paper after the research. So this research started like literally like three years ago and and Hashten really did a good job and then you can find the summary here. And so I will I think the easiest way to understand the atomic swap is to play for the protocol. And we have a representation of the protocol in as a patronette. Can you guys tell me if you can see? If I zoom out, can you still see like this? Yes, we're largely able to see. I'm getting a good quality coming in from you. So the people watching the stream should still be able to read the text. Okay, that's great. Okay, so I'm going to just show like this. So here we have basically a protocol representation. So here you have Bob who starts with Bitcoin in his private wallet and Alice that starts with Monero on her private wallet. And what if the protocol goes through like Alice should end up with Bitcoin and Bob should end up with Monero on their private wallets. And I'm going to play the protocol and slowly I'm going to explain more and more what each transaction does and how they're looking like. So basically all the logic will happen on the Bitcoin side because Monero doesn't just fix keys. So how we do it is like you do a whole game theory on the Bitcoin side. So like Bob is going to Bob with Bitcoin is going to need the protocol by creating two transactions. A soft lock transaction that's going to be the transaction that locks the Monero, the Bitcoin that is going to be sent to Alice. So it's the locked Bitcoin is going to end up with this script on this output. And a transaction that is a refund transaction and Bob already partially signs it and sends it to Alice. And this refund transaction is going to spend the soft lock output and give the money back to Bob basically. So this is a refund path. So Alice checks the information that Bob gives and Alice signs the refund transaction because all the information is correct. And having the refund Bob can safely lock the money on this soft lock contract and publish it to the blockchain, wait for it to be mined. And the money is going to be on this very special output here. Nothing happened on Monero chain yet. Alice has to lock her money as well. And Alice is going to feel convinced she should do it because she can see that the lock Bitcoin is locked in the correct address. So basically Alice locks her Monero in this special address. This address is derived by both Alice and Bob actually. So none of them control this address. They only know half of the private keys. So what is interesting now is that whoever learns the other half of the private key gets the Bitcoin, gets the Monero, sorry. And it's either going to be a refund or a complete swap. So at this point, Alice can't do anything. Bob has to reveal a special secret. This is just a synchronization secret. It's like a the authorization of Bob to let Alice move on on the protocol. So Bob shares the secret. This secret is needed to unlock this output. So this output needs this secret, synchronization secret, it needs Alice. This Alice half key is the is the private spend key that is locked in this output here. So Bob has half of it. Alice has the other half. So basically in order to Alice to spend this output, she's going to have to reveal this key. How does she reveal this key is through this. So basically we use this ECDSA adapter signature, which is basically like Alice's, Bob gives Alice an encrypted transaction that in order for her to do an encrypted signature and in order for her to decrypt the signature and use it here, she has to, she's going to, when she decrypted, she links this key basically. Because if you have the Bob has the decrypted and encrypted version of the signature, he can recover easily this key. So basically you force Alice to reveal this key and Alice gets the Bitcoin in her private wallet. Now this key that got leaked can be used by Bob to claim his Monero on the other side. So that's how the protocol would run in the successful case. But of course there are tons of cases that are not the successful case. And for example, I went back in time a little bit. For example here, like basically Bob recites that he doesn't give the secret to authorize Alice to continue running the protocol. So he doesn't trigger this. What can Alice do? The only thing she can do is like after a timeout, this is a, she can publish the refund transaction. Okay now let's try, now we're going to understand a little bit the refund transaction. So she, Alice published this refund transaction because Bob wasn't responsive. He wasn't triggering this one. And so like right now, if Bob does not become responsive, Alice is going to be able to take this path and take the Bitcoin. But if Bob can, he should become responsive. Otherwise he's going to lose his money. And he's going to try to consume this output. And again, this is like the same scheme as before with adapter signature. And this key is going to get leaked by Bob decrypting Alice's signature that is needed on this transaction. And it's interesting now that because Bob leaked his Monero key, Alice can claim her refund on the Monero chain like this. So this is very interesting because like we managed to, like although we don't have any time lock or any scripting capability here, we managed to gain liveness by forcing Bob to act. So we forced Bob to leak this key. And so basically, we managed to make this protocol live just on the Bitcoin, with Game Theory on the Bitcoin side. And yeah, so many things can happen here, like even things that should never happen. For example, let's go back in time. It should never happen. It should happen on the protocol, but in practice, it will not happen because of Game Theory. So let's see, for example, if you would allow Alice not to lock her Monero, if Alice just refuses to, oops, let's go here. So Bitcoin is locked and there is no, and Alice doesn't lock her Monero. Then like Bob goes, okay, I'm going to claim the refund after time lock. And now what if, so there's this path, for example, here that Alice can spend the refund. So if this would happen, Alice would end up with both Bitcoin and Monero. And that's totally not an atomic swap. So this path is very important for the Game Theory that we explained before. It's to force Bob to react. So in practice, this path would never happen because Bob can directly move the Bitcoin from this output into his private wallet by publishing this transaction and this transaction together. And this transaction, he could pay tons of fees to make it pay for the child, the parent pays for the child. So we are pretty convinced that by basically embedding the Monero private spend keys as the encryption keys for some Bitcoin signatures is a very interesting way to basically leak keys that can be used on the other chain. And with the trick that Sarah presented before, explained before in previous talk, you can like, because Monero and Bitcoin use different curves. So you can prove that that key is actually the same on both sides. So we're pretty convinced that the protocol is complete. Yeah. So if you guys have any questions specific to the protocol, I think it's very interesting, especially now that we can try to play it. Sure. Thank you so much. First, I just want to point out that I'm paying attention to the YouTube. I'm paying attention to Discord. Surring nother is still on. So if he does have any questions, of course, Surring, hop on in. I guess first question. So you've architected the general process for how it works. What is the next step to implement this into a functional system? What does that look like? Oh, so we have to first start organizing ourselves to see how big of a project this can be in terms of how many people should work on it. We are currently like three people and maybe we want to work with more people on this project if it happens. Like, basically, we're still like in the face of trying to write some timeline of a project, like some deliverables that we know are necessary, let's say prerequisites for achieving the final goal. So basically, I think in the next months or so, I think we're going to basically present this to the community and make a CCS proposal. And depending on how it goes, then we will see how much effort we can put into it. But there's a lot of things to be done. On the GitHub page that you shared, and I also sent this on YouTube for people to see, I'll post it in Discord also. Is this diagram available there too? Oh, the issue of this diagram is that it uses some weird software to play it. And today my housemate took two hours to get it to work. So the description is easy to give, but this software is very weird. Greatest PN editor, but I could share the diagrams. Yeah, I can't say I've heard of this before, but even like a PDF export or something. Oh yeah, that's for sure. That's easy. So I think we can share the sub graphs for sure. We want to eventually make a playable JavaScript thing out of this, but we have to do by hand. Yeah. Okay, understood. It is really cool to see a walkthrough with this because I know that you publish some stuff on GitHub. I personally haven't really looked through it in full detail. Just I don't have those skills personally. I know other people in the community are excited and have looked at it. So it is cool to be able to sit down and have this walkthrough right in front of me. I think it's a very good initial starting point to get some of the ideas in here.  So I think this kind of diagram helps you bind together all the information because you have all these Bitcoin transactions and it's a little hard to see what are the requirements of them and things like that.  Oh, this transaction is making that key or it's forcing him to act quick before that path becomes available. And I think this is where this kind of diagrams, several patterns, they bind everything together and it's much easier to go through it. And this is actually a form of diagram. It's not just a graph. So I did have one question. 99.9% sure I know the answer, but I think it's helpful to ask anyone just to clarify, especially for anyone else who maybe hasn't read the PDF yet. This doesn't require any particular protocol changes to either the Bitcoin or the Monero side. Is that right? Yes, that's right. Because I seem to remember seeing a couple of questions just in other media that basically seem to imply like, you know, when would a network upgrade enable this just to be clear, like there wouldn't need to be networks, network upgrades to enable this. I mean, in theory, people could be doing this right now, although it seems very unlikely without software support, right? Yeah. So for sure, like we don't need anything right now. Even the ECDSA has been done already, like we were totally unaware of this work, but it looks like very high quality, so if you can just use it. So like, basically, we just use like a normal key in Monero and in Bitcoin in scripts, there is fingerprinting like from the Bitcoin script. So people are going to be able to possibly tell that, oh, this is, this was probably an atomic swap. Like this is this follows like that protocol there. So however, after that route, software, I think it's B341, like we could hide this protocol in the success cases, if people all agree on it. So then it would be pretty interesting, because then we wouldn't have any trace left on the Bitcoin blockchain about the swap. Okay, sorry, just to be clear, you may have said this, and maybe I just wasn't listening closely enough. So as far as the soft fork is concerned, are you saying that's a soft fork in Monero or Bitcoin to enable that, where in the best of cases, if it goes through and there are no contentious problems, that it would be much more difficult to mark the Bitcoin as related to a swap? It's sorry. So soft fork, is that related to Monero or Bitcoin? Bitcoin, sorry, this is the Bitcoin, it's like the, it's the big snore, big tab route, the tab script. It's like, so it's, if when Bitcoin gets snore, Bitcoin is going to get tab route as well. So it's, that's what I'm talking about. So but before you can look at it and say, oh, that could be an atomic swap. After that, then you can't say anything. So it's very interesting. Okay, very interesting. That'll help prevent a surveillance software from just marking it all as higher risk. Yeah. Okay, this is the last question, just putting it out there for those that are watching this on YouTube or anything. If you have any questions, now's a great chance to answer them. We have just a few minutes left, although it doesn't seem like this research team is going anywhere. It looks like they're just getting started. They have their work cut out for themselves. But it is exciting to hear about it. Really no questions coming in. Serene, did you have anything else that you wanted to get at? You may have walked away. No, no, no, I'm here. No, I think this is, I think this is extremely exciting.  You know, I think making sure that it's clearly understood that the privacy implications are about how the transactions are initialized initially, and there have been some talk on, you know, our research on channel about this too. But, you know, I mean, this is great.  And they're like, yeah, wouldn't that be great. And now it turns out like, this adapter signature and cross group stuff, it can be done. So I think it's very exciting. Yeah, I have to say, when I first saw the pitch of like Monero Bitcoin Atomic Swaps, I just assumed it was someone trying to pitch like a centralized exchange that they were just calling a swap.  This is actually something that's, that's not just Yeah, we started at CCC and we were just like, how do we make Bitcoin private? And I guess one last question that I had that, you know, that is mentioned in the paper, you know, I think it's actually mentioned pretty, pretty clear in the paper too, that this is not just limited to Monero or to Bitcoin. In the paper, you know, you and your colleagues talk about kind of pretty specifically what the requirements are for each of the different kind of types of chains and protocols. Is that right? Yeah, like, basically, like think about it, how much are we using of Monero here? Like, it's just a normal address. Like, so it's like, there's nothing special there. So anything that has as much capability as Monero can be one side of the Bitcoin trade. But so like, if you go, so Bitcoin is already very capable. So if you go to things that are more capable than that, that Bitcoin, then it's like, it gets even easier. But of course, then you get more finger printing, like, even like, so you have like, like much deeper traces of what you've been doing left on chain. So yeah, like so for sure, like, and I think the trick of the cross group equality, that that makes like the bridge between any identity curve, I think, like, so then like, you can just basically cross across any, any chain, basically, if you can, if you can produce these groups. So I think it's, it's, it's pretty like the protocol itself, because we can play like the game theory, only once on one side shows it, that it's possible to do stuff with very limited resources, I think protocols should be very minimal. And and like, we cannot use complicated primitives, or let's say complicated systems to deal with simple things like, like accounting. And it sounds like on the Bitcoin side, at least, maybe the big limitation right now is just in CDSA. Is that right?  Like, like, yeah, to do that, the adapter signature on, on snor would be trivial. For example. Yeah, cool. Thanks for the questions. Oh, thank you. I know we were brought in here the last minute to do something, but it was definitely worth it. It was great to have you included at DEF CON.