By Cynthia Gentile, J.D., SHRM-CP , Faculty Member, Dr. Wallace E. Boston School of Business;
Ivy Kempf, attorney, Faculty Member, Peirce College;
Ruth Shaber and Patience Marime-Ball, authors, The XX Edge
Investing portfolios led by women tend to perform better with lower defaults and better risk management. In this episode, Cynthia Gentile leads a discussion of The XX Edge, a new book focused on gender diverse decision-making.
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Cynthia Gentile: Welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Cynthia Gentile. Today, I’m thrilled to welcome back Ivy Kempf, a professor of legal studies at Peirce College in Philadelphia, and authors Ruth Shaber and Patience Marime-Ball. Ruth and Patience, thank you for joining us today. We’re excited to discuss your book, The XX Edge: Unlocking Higher Returns and Lower Risk, which was published in June of 2022. Thank you and welcome all.
Ruth Shaber: Thanks for having us.
Patience Marime-Ball: Thank you for having us.
Cynthia Gentile I’ve been looking forward to our conversation for weeks. Let’s just dig right in. Ruth and Patience, could you start by sharing a bit of your impressive and wide-ranging professional backgrounds and maybe help us understand why you set out to write this book right now?
Ruth Shaber: Sure. This is Ruth and I’ll get started. I have a very unusual background that led me to this field of gender finance. I’m an obstetrician gynecologist and I had a very robust career at Kaiser Permanente for 26 years, where in addition to being a clinician, I also had many executive roles.
In my different executive roles, I oversaw Kaiser’s evidence-based medicine programs and population care programs and had the opportunity to understand systems engineering in an extremely complex system. Essentially, my job was to translate medical evidence into the actual practice that the members of Kaiser Permanente received.
When I left Kaiser in 2012, it was with the intention of bringing all that I had learned about systems engineering to the field of philanthropy and impact investing. I’ve started Tara Health Foundation in 2014 and we also took a very novel approach. Our mission was to improve the lives of women and girls, but we wanted to use a hundred percent of our assets towards this mission.
Most foundations really only think about their grant making, which is just 5% of their capital. In our case, we looked at a hundred percent of our capital. That meant thinking about a strategy for private markets, public markets, debt, and how we could build the field of gender lens investing. That journey is what led me to meeting patients.
Patience Marime-Ball: All right, so thank you, Ruth. And I’m going to just give a couple of words about my background. I’ve worked all of my life in finance. My educational background is a law degree and an MBA, and I was going to be a human rights lawyer until I realized that folks have rights as long as they can access them, and economic capacity really underpins access to most of the rights that we talk about, including right to shelter, right to food, et cetera, et cetera.
I did a JD MBA and started investing at the International Finance Corporation, and that is the private sector arm of the World Bank. The early part of my career, I invested in par generation assets around the world and then moved to doing distress assets work, so restructuring non-performing portfolios of investments, and then finally moved to investing in financial institutions. These are commercial banks around the world. In that role, I was sitting in that role when the 2008 financial crisis happened, and Christine Lagarde said something that really results in a pivotal moment in my career. She said, “If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, things would’ve been different.”
I started really interrogating my work and the capital that I was influencing and allocating for how much of it was actually being directed with gender focused strategies or gender informed strategies, and ended up building for the IFC, the Banking on Women platform, which is now a multi-billion dollar platform to provide access to capital for women entrepreneurs around the world, not at the micro level, but at the next level, the women who are building SMEs that are the engine for growth and jobs in most economies.
We issued the first ever gender bond on the EU DESI market. We did the first ever global debt fund with Goldman Sachs for $600 million, and that’s deployed billions of dollars as well. I took early retirement to hang out with my boys, but to also continue to invest in gender diverse teams, in this case, for my own account, was invited to join a venture fund.
In the time that we are trying to raise, I realized that there was a problem, and that problem was upstream. Asset owners upstream did not necessarily understand the value of women around the table, the value of women’s innovation, the value of women decision making, et cetera, et cetera. They kept asking us if we meant microfinance or cook stoves, if we wanted to invest in those, as if that’s the only technology and the only capital that women can handle. That frustrated me enough to end up founding in 2018 Women of the World Endowment.
Women of the World Endowment is focused on building a large capital base that can have a seat in the room with other asset owners to do three things. One like Tara Health Foundation, invest all the capital intentionally. So, with a gender focused commitment. So, we invest across asset classes and sectors, but with singular commitment that every one of our investments has an agenda focused strategy and delivers impact as well as significant financial performance.
We also work on curating strategic capital that we use to influence other asset owners. Finally, with the income that we generate, we invest in nonprofits that are doing the hard work of removing the friction out of capital flows so that those capital flows get directed to solving problems and giving people inclusive opportunity. So that’s Women of the World Endowment.
Ruth and I met three years ago in 2019 when we were at an event in Italy together and we arranged a breakfast. Ruth brought to that breakfast a systems map of capital markets that she and the team at Tara Health Foundation and an external party had been building. This identified the areas of leverage in capital markets, where if things were done differently, capital might flow differently, and women might be able to allocate more of it.
We basically fell in love with each other’s purpose as well as became really good friends. And now, Ruth serves as the chair of WOWE’s board, also gave us a significant grant to really fuel our work, and we started collaborating. In that collaboration came the idea around The XX Edge. Ruth is going to tell a little bit about how that came about.
Ruth Shaber: Yeah, so the origin story of why we wrote this book, you asked Cyndi. I had been invited to lead a training in Singapore for a big impact investing summit. There was a half day training that I recruited Patience to join me.
We went off to Singapore to do this training with a bunch of Asian impact investors and we were also invited to this breakfast event by a very fancy lawyer banker, and in her private office with all of her best friends. There were about 30 people in the room, half men and half women. It was a lovely event, beautiful view over the Singapore Harbor, and we started talking about gender investing and we noticed immediately that all the women in the room were completely engaged, leaning in. They were fascinated by the topic and really anxious to share their own stories about how difficult it was for them to get access to capital and the double standards for women as founders of companies and all the things that we outlined in the book.
At the same time the men in the room, who were very happy to be there eating their very fancy breakfast, all had their heads down, shoveling their food into their mouths and really had no idea why they would be even invited. It was at that moment, I think, that Patience and I realized that we needed to find a way to jump the fence and really communicate the power of gender diverse investing to these men and not just those men in that room, but men throughout the systems of finance. Those are the folks who control 97.7% of the capital in the world. If we weren’t going to start finding a way to talk to them that we weren’t going to ever get out of the niche that gender investing has been in.
We knew that there was really powerful performance data that, if we could speak to the men in finance about how well their portfolios will perform, if they understand the power of gender diversity, that that would be an effective way. We hope that’s an effective way to speak to them.
Patience Marime-Ball: But I just wanted to pick up on what Ruth said about the importance of the data, the performance data. Earlier on, I talked about how SMEs are the engine of growth in any economy. We also know that women are starting and building small and medium size enterprises at an accelerated rate.
We also know that they also tend to employ more women in those jobs and so that’s really important. That’s just sort of the micro grounding, but in terms of the data that we were able to pull and put together, Ruth and I were actually afraid that we would end up having to cherry pick which asset classes or which sectors show better performance when it comes to women being at the decision-making table. We didn’t have to. It turns out that there is data that says when women, when you have gender diverse teams making decisions, you have a likelihood, a 21% likelihood of better performance emerging from those decisions just on a profitability basis.
If you take that to across the value chain of entities from early-stage companies, when you have one woman in a founding team of a new company, there’s a 63% likelihood that that entity will survive and actually do well and be more resilient. We have data that shows that, even in the high finance, in hedge funds, where you’d think, well, that’s just too high finance for women to do well, there’s data that shows that actually, the average of women run strategies, risk strategies in the hedge fund space outperform the average of large hedge funds by as much as 6%. This was observed over a six-year period.
I could just go on. When it comes to loans to enterprises, and this one Ruth loves to tell as well, but the portfolio that we built at the IOC allowed us to actually do an in-depth analysis of the non-performing loans within those portfolios to look at gender desegregated portfolios and see how much defaults they had in them. The women portfolios had lower NPLs, lower non-performing loans, lower defaults, and so across the spectrum you just see better performance, better risk mitigation. This book surfaced all of that data so that we could demonstrate that you get wealthier and healthier portfolios when you have gender diverse decision-making.
Cynthia Gentile I’m going to take some time in a moment to talk about just how incredibly well researched this book is, but I wanted to just back up for one moment and ask if you could clarify or give us some context around the use of the word woman in the book. What do we mean by gender diverse and what do you mean by women?
Ruth Shaber: Thanks for that question, Cyndi. I think it’s a really important one just to ground us. In my background in evidence-based medicine and evidence-based practice, I think it’s important to be really clear about your definitions and your terms.
Most of the research that’s been done around finance and diversity and the benefits of having diverse teams, at any stage in the finance supply chain, have been based on self-described women. If we’re guilty of having these descriptors that are not inclusive, it’s really because that’s where the research is.
We wanted to be clear that we’re basing our conclusions on published research. Most of the diversity science that’s out there is on men versus women, and it’s cis men versus cis women, but we fully understand and appreciate that gender is fluid and that there are many of the traits and the behaviors that we identify as being more typical for women that are certainly present in many men and in many trans women or trans men. We want to be clear the research is based on the traditional definition of women, but these are traits that appear throughout the spectrum of personalities and people.
Ivy Kempf: The XX Edge is an incredibly well-researched book, and it raises the profile of gender diverse investing or strategy to both support organizations that optimize the strengths of women as decision makers and it brings about higher returns for investors. I was particularly drawn to the way that you use data to support each and every contention you make within this book. There’s so much data, can you isolate a story or two that’s representative of why gender diversity is a successful investment strategy?
Patience Marime-Ball: Thank you very much, Ivy, for that question. And somebody said, “Well, your book is full of so much data and so many stories. I don’t know. It ends up being confusing,” but what we wanted to do, at least this one gentleman gave the feedback, but what we wanted to do was to show that there isn’t … this is the only lane where women are successful, or this is the only asset class or whatever it is. We wanted to show that these successes are across the spectrum.
One of my favorite stories, and it’s partly a favorite story because it’s very real and everyone in the world can relate to it and especially in this moment, is the story of mRNA, the research that brought about the COVID vaccines. What most people didn’t understand before we had the vaccines is that that science is very female. It starts with the CRISPR gene editing science that was the work of folks like Jennifer Doudna and Charpentier, a French scientist and American scientist who got a Nobel Prize for that science. That science is the underpinning for mRNA, which is a science that is the other side of DNA. A lot of men who went into DNA science, some women chose the path less traveled, but it was also the path less funded, and it was conviction. A couple of characteristics that we isolated in this book is the way women are collaborative, that they have the long view, and are also risk aware.
That long view part of it is that, with conviction, they stay the course. In this case, we have Dr. Katalin Kairkó who stayed for 35 years with the study of mRNA, was underfunded when she was in the lab doing the RND, tried to take that science and start her own company, couldn’t raise funding, and it took a man who read a paper recognizing that there was quite a bit of science and validity to her science that he started BioNTech, which ended up being acquired by Pfizer, and hence the Pfizer vaccine.
The reality of it is that, if she had been funded when she was toiling in those RND labs, and less than 1% of RND capital, less than 2% goes to women scientists or women-led labs. We are missing the opportunity of funding these amazing solutions that solve all kinds of downstream problems when we don’t give capital to women.
That story is a favorite because we are now hanging out with each other, having dinners, and we’ll speak, talk about dinner later on in lunches and breakfast, et cetera, because we’re now out and about again. That is a very female science. I think Ruth has a favorite story too. Ruth, do you want to tell yours?
Ruth Shaber: Absolutely. One of the characteristics of problem-solving that I think is really important to recognize and we bring out in the book is that the people who are closest to the problems that technology or innovation is trying to solve are important contributors to those solutions.
I learned this in my career in healthcare. If you’re trying to develop a new research protocol or a new program to treat people with diabetes or how folks get care in an operating room, if you don’t actually talk to the people who are either delivering the care or who are receiving that care, you’re never going to come up with the right solutions. We call it proximity to problems, and so there are so many innovations in the world that are brilliant because the people who are solving those problems and contributing those innovations are actually the ones suffering from the problems.
One of my favorite innovations that we talk about in the book is an app called Safety Pin, which was designed by some activist women in Delhi, India, and they were responding to the violence in their city, and in particular a gang rape of a woman on a bus. They use very similar technology that we take for granted now when we’re driving, that we can use Google Maps or WAZE, and know where there’s an accident because it’s a crowdsource information that people put in where they’ve seen an accident or where there’s a traffic stop.
What they designed with Safety Pin is an app where people could put in where violence was happening in their city, where the streetlights were out and it was dark, where they knew an abandoned building and there were gangs hanging out. They developed this app as a tool, as a for-profit tool, not just as a social good, that could drive much better safety protocols, and essentially just have people know where it was safe to go in their own cities. The app has turned into a really important tool for government partnerships and has spread really around the world. I think that’s a great example of innovation because the people who were suffering the most really came to the table and designed the product.
Cyndi and Ivy, one of my favorite stories from the book is about the history of crash test dummies. And I think this is a good example of how important it is to have women at the table when you’re designing innovations, how you’re thinking about the products and the markets that you hope that they all impact.
Crash test dummies were an innovation in the 1950s. Really important, because before then, any kind of automobile safety experiments were done on live people, so we’re very grateful for crash test dummies. But interestingly, they did not consider having multiple crash test dummies. There was only one and it was the weight and size and anatomy of the average size man. As a result, when new safety innovations like airbags and seat restraints and headrests were being developed, they were really only tested on this one prototype. And as a result, women really were disproportionately impacted by crashes after the airbags were implemented and became a safety regulation.
You think about that workaround that we still have in all of our cars where you can turn off the airbag in the passenger seat. That really was because women were dying when their airbags would go off because they’d hit them in the face, because it didn’t really take into consideration the difference in anatomy. I think that’s a great example of how important it is when products are being designed to have a full understanding of the market that you’re trying to target and having women at the table when those innovative decisions are being made.
One thing I also want to really bring up is we talk a lot about gender diversity and diversity more broadly. As I said before, most of the research that we pull from in this book has been done with women. Sometimes it’s women solely led teams, but most of the research is around diverse teams where there are both men and women at the table. That’s a really important fundamental issue for us is that this is not about men versus women. This is about male only teams versus gender diverse teams.
I think that it’s true that we can extrapolate what we’ve learned in this research to any time when you have a homogeneous group of people sitting around a table making a decision. In this case, we’re comparing men to men and women together, but anytime you have one group of people who are trying to make important decisions, they don’t see all the risks. They don’t see around the corners. They don’t fully understand the impact of the decisions that are being made.
This is not a replacement strategy. This is not about switching out men for women. This is about adding seats at the table, bringing in more people, more women in the case of what we describe in the book, but more people of all types. What we know is that, when you do that, the evidence is really clear that you actually get economic growth.
At the micro level, when you have diverse teams, then you see the budgets expand and more opportunity. Certainly, at the macro level and at a country in a global level, when women are included in the economy and included in financial decision-making, you see the potential for tremendous growth in GDP and growth of our economies.
Cynthia Gentile Thank you all for helping me explore the concept of gender diverse investing. I’m Cynthia Gentile and we’ll be right back.
Cynthia Gentile Welcome back. Today, Professor Ivy Kemp and I are talking to authors Ruth Shaber and Patience Marime-Ball about their new book, The XX Edge. Let’s get right back to it.
Patience Marime-Ball: The book has sections to it. The first part was all this data that we wanted to pull together to show the evidence across asset classes and sectors. There’s another part of the book where Ruth and I have so much fun just creating moonshot thinking around what if. We called it the what if strategies like in the care economy, in the healthcare sector, in climate mitigation. What if we had more women in those seats, in the leadership seats, in decision-making seats? And so that part was fun.
In the last part of the book, we really thought, well, if by the end of the book the men are brought in, what are some of the things they need to do? We created checklists across a number of areas, including if you’re an asset owner, an asset manager, how do you need to think about moving your capital?
If you’re an asset owner, you must think about who are the people moving my capital? Who’s actually making the decisions to allocate my capital? Because we know a couple of things. A single dollar can do more than one thing at any given time. Whoever is allocating that capital gets to decide the purpose of that capital downstream.
In addition to making money, money can do many other good things. A dollar, a single dollar, can do all those other things as well. Having that diversity in the room really matters, so if you’re an asset owner, think about who you have in the rooms making decisions about your money. If you’re an asset manager who is next to you in the investment committee room making those decisions where capital is going.
Most people think that they’re not asset allocators. If you have a pension, you are an asset allocator. Right? You have sometimes the opportunity to pick which companies or which mutual funds your money is supporting. There are now tools out there that can allow you to look behind the mutual fund and actually see the companies within those mutual funds and see whether those companies are gender positive or are aligned with your values.
Every decision that we make in the capital market space, and all of us are decision makers in the capital market space, because we spend money. You make decisions about where you spend that money, right? That’s a capital market. That fuels the economy. All of those you should be able to ask. Ruth loves to talk about even supporting women founded companies in your local neighborhood. Ruth, do you want to go a little bit into that?
Ruth Shaber: Yeah. In terms of checklists, some folks that we talk to about the book don’t see themselves as investors. But actually, every time that you decide where you’re going to buy products from, you’re making an investment in that company. You can go actually on Google now and put in women owned companies near me. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t also frequent male owned companies, but it’s good to be aware and to think about, if I have a choice, where do I want my dollars to go?
At Tara Health Foundation, we started out talking about how we are a hundred percent mission aligned and we use a gender screen and that means something different for every type of capital. When we’re providing a loan, we might think about, well, how is this enterprise that we’re providing a loan to going to take women into consideration? Are there women who are owners of that debt? Are there women who are making the decisions about the budget for that entity?
We think about, when we’re investing in early-stage companies, we want to make sure that even if the founders are men, and there are plenty of companies we’ve invested in that have male founders, but we want to make sure that they’re bringing women into their market analysis and they’re thinking about how their products are going to be used and consumed by women. Certainly, in the public equity space, we think about how many women are on the boards of those companies and in the leadership team and how are they thinking about the benefits to retain and attract the most talented women to those companies, so things like paid leave, coverage of healthcare benefits.
There are checklists that are pretty easy to think about, but I think it depends on where you sit in the supply chain of finance. We’re all there whether you like it or not.
Patience Marime-Ball: Or the value chain of life, including if you are a male leader and you’re thinking about who you’re mentoring, who you’re promoting, who you’re sponsoring to those decision-making roles. You, too, can have a role to play in changing the diversity in every single room.
One of the things that we think about at Women of the World Endowment, including to all the things that Ruth said about our portfolios, is really when we have an opportunity to do direct investments in early-stage companies, we always think about how much leverage are we going to get out of that? Our investment is a small investment, but is this company well placed to actually provide us with influence, to provide us with access into rooms that we’d otherwise not have access into?
It’s very much everyone thinking to the point I made about what is the purpose of every single dollar? Right? With those investments, we are getting financial returns, but we are also getting the potential that those companies are going to influence other asset owners or other people to act differently and bring about better outcomes for more people, more opportunity for more people.
Cynthia Gentile I think it’s really interesting the way that you tie not just investing in a more traditional or technical sense, but also with where we actually spend our dollars as a consumer in this same thought process of approaching it from a gender diverse standpoint. It made me think about the idea that a budget is a moral document. It helps us think about what’s important to us, but so are our choices towards both investing and spending.
Sometimes I think people get tied into a thought, like if I’m opposed to a product or a company, then I can boycott it. But we don’t necessarily make the jump to, if I support a company, if I appreciate a company’s stance on something, then I can support it with my dollar. Even that dollar has impact.
I do think that that’s a really important piece of your lesson here in this book. Patience, one of the things that you mentioned was the term care economy. The book does discuss this a little bit and it talks about why women are so central to that conversation. Can you give me some kind of context around the care economy and maybe, Ruth or Patience, how COVID has impacted that notion of women in the care economy?
Patience Marime-Ball: Yeah, so this is another story that I love to tell, and we love doing the research around this as well because like the mRNA research that is very close to our lived experience in this moment. It’s not close to a single group of people. It is a global experience. Really beginning to appreciate what the care economy means is also a recent global experience. Everyone, women and men, experienced what it means to not have good infrastructure around the care economy.
Then, economies, actually some of them ground to a halt because of this lack of good attention to our care economy infrastructure. When we talk about the care economy, we’re talking about early age care, but also elder care, but the stuff in between. Our healthcare system is in some ways part of the care economy. The healthcare system is 70% female, by the way, at the lower levels, but not at the leadership levels. It’s less than 25% female at the leadership levels. We are proximate to the solutions that are being applied but not proximate to the budget allocations that are being made.
You are absolutely right. Budget allocations really do determine what is being prioritized. In the care economy, it has traditionally been female. It has not been recognized as something professional, so it has not been renumerated. It has just been almost outside of what people would even think of as part of the economy. That became a problem when COVID came along, and people didn’t have care infrastructure. Then, the care infrastructure that existed is not adequate.
One of the studies we have in this book, and actually in the what if, moonshot thinking, space in the book, the care economy is one of those places, one of those areas or sectors that we spent some time on. It was partly because of its really sort of recognized importance as people left jobs because they could not be present for their families and still be in the workspace. We recognized that our caregivers are also essential workers and how do those things sit alongside and allow economies to keep thriving?
We have an incredible opportunity coming out of COVID. Really, we wanted to write this book, and have it come out in the context of still struggling with the impact of COVID and the opportunities that it presented because we wanted for these memories to be proximate. The care economy is one of those things that became incredibly highlighted, and the solutions are both policy-related, but they’re also private company related, to Ruth’s point.
If you’re looking at where your money’s going, are you investing in companies that have the appropriate infrastructure for women and men to thrive in the workspace, which means provision of care, some kind of care benefits? But also, in terms of innovation, people are now really thinking about innovative solutions and investible strategies for the care economy. There are some countries that have done this incredibly well, some Nordic countries, and we give examples of how that came about.
I think it is Norway that we have in the book. I haven’t looked at that chapter in a bit, but it’s Norway that we have in the book where we talk about how, after the second World War, women who had been allowed to come to work were now told, go back to home and look after the kids. It is the story of how the activism that started with women saying, “Oh, we want to be back in the workplace, and this is the infrastructure we need for us to thrive in the workspace,” has really made Norway one of the best countries with the best care economy infrastructure.
What if the rest of the world really came to a place where it is valued, it is professionalized, it is renumerated, it is not seen as women only work, it is gender diverse in the same way that investment rooms should be gender diverse. Care economy should be gender diverse. I think we’re going to build a better infrastructure in a better world.
Ivy Kempf: You guys probably both know that this is typically a legal podcast where Cindy and I talk about legal issues. I kind of want to ask a question related to that and ask you guys what’s the relationship between the legal and the investment sectors when it comes to gender? And Patience, maybe I’ll throw it to you, since you’ve got the JD, but also I’d love to hear Ruth’s input.
Patience Marime-Ball: The reality of it is that lawyers and the ones who are doing the right thing are creating the infrastructure, the economic contract that we all have, whether it’s our jobs or whatever it is, that we have movement of capital between different entities. The legal profession is central to all of that and most of it comes at it from risk mitigation.
When you want to mitigate a risk, you go to your lawyers and your lawyers are the ones who advise you around what are the structures to mitigate that risk. I think there’s an incredible opportunity for the legal world to recognize that risk mitigation is not just about the four corners of the document. It is about who is in the room. It is the governance infrastructure around our global operations. Right?
When we don’t have the appropriate governance infrastructure that includes women, because we know that having women at the table is going to give you the risk awareness, greater risk awareness. Women tend to just; it’s traditionally been called risk averse. No. Women are more risk aware, and so having that risk awareness at the table and creating structures that actually risk mitigate and provide better governance all around will result in better outcomes. Generally, better risk mitigation is healthier portfolios, and ultimately, whether it’s a company or healthier economies, and everybody wins.
Our view is when we think about how, lawyers are the first line of defense, most companies when they want to mitigate their school, come to their lawyers. I think it’s really incumbent on the legal profession to go beyond the four letters of the document and really think what does a risk management infrastructure actually include? We posit in this book that includes having women at the table making decisions alongside the men.
Ruth Shaber: I think that these learnings are applicable to any sector. Certainly, the legal sector has a particular role to play in the risk assessment, but wherever you sit, whether you’re in local government, you’re on a school board or you are in the social services, you’re running a nonprofit, you’re in healthcare, you’re education, you’re a teacher. If you look around the room and it feels like you’re looking in a mirror, then there’s a problem.
It’s not just about bringing more women into the finance rooms, but of course that’s a fundamental core problem in the economy that we’re not taking advantage of women’s talent and the power of diversity. But anywhere you sit in the decision-making, that we need diversity in order to come up with better solutions. I think the same learnings that we’re applying to high finance and to business sectors are also true throughout the economy and throughout the sectors that we all engage with every day.
Cynthia Gentile Well, this conversation has been truly fascinating. I’m so grateful to you, Ruth and Patience, for writing this book and for taking the time to share it with us today. And thank you to our listeners for joining us. Be well and be safe.
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