Supporter Spotlight
WOMEN’S WAY 2025 Lucretia Mott Honoree: Ruth Shaber, MD
Does the word ‘investor’ sound like something you’d never call yourself? Ruth Shaber, MD, the founder of the Tara Health Foundation and co-author of The XX Edge, wants to change that by encouraging each of us to start thinking and acting as gender equity investors.
Through her work, Dr. Shaber has shown that the future of economic growth and social impact lies in women holding greater control over the flow of resources. From improving health outcomes to driving social change, the data shows that when women have a greater role in how capital is invested, the social and economic results are better for everyone.
We are proud to honor Dr. Shaber on May 21st, 2025, at the WOMEN’S WAY 47th Annual Celebration, where she will receive our most prestigious honor, the Lucretia Mott Award. Ahead of the event, we had an opportunity to sit down with her to discuss her transformative work, the importance of challenging traditional investment models, and why each of us should be acting as gender equity investors. Read on to learn more!
Your career has spanned medicine, philanthropy, and finance. What inspired you to transition from being an OBGYN to founding Tara Health Foundation, and how did that shift shape your approach?
That’s a great question, and I love talking about the thread that connects all of my different careers. And there is a thread; although, I’d say my career has largely been opportunistic. I never set out with a plan to do one thing after another. It’s often been about recognizing the opportunities that came my way and figuring out how to take advantage of them.
I loved being a doctor. I loved taking care of women in the exam room and providing that customized, one-on-one experience. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that no matter how good of a physician you are, it’s not enough if the system itself isn’t working. Being a good doctor in a broken system is still inadequate. I began to understand that while I could make a difference one-on-one, if I had the opportunity to change the system, I could impact many more lives.
“It didn’t take long for me to realize that no matter how good of a physician you are, it’s not enough if the system itself isn’t working.”
That realization is part of what led me into my career as a healthcare executive at Kaiser Permanente and then to philanthropy and investing. By working to change the healthcare and finance systems, I knew that I could expand my impact further.
When my career moved into the healthcare system, I saw what it takes to improve outcomes on a population level. Pretty early on, I also realized that it’s all about the money, especially in women’s health, which has been underfunded for so long. There’s been so little innovation. If you compare the amount of money spent on developing new cancer or infectious disease treatments versus something like contraception, the gap is staggering. As a physician, when I ended my clinical career in 2012, I was still prescribing pretty much the same contraceptive methods I had when I started. Nothing had changed.
For me, the common thread running through all of it is the power of women and the importance of women’s health — not just for individuals, but for families, communities, and society. And you can’t truly support that without also addressing the money. That’s what ties it all together.
You’ve worked to bring new types of capital to the reproductive health space. Can you share more about how you are working to shift the landscape of reproductive health funding?
When we started the Tara Health Foundation, our intention was to be 100% mission-aligned, which meant we needed a strategy for every asset class. The grantmaking part was easy; foundations have been doing that for generations. But we also had to think about our whole portfolio — including our private capital, our venture capital, public markets, and how we could provide loans. We often used our philanthropic dollars to build the infrastructure that would help us invest more effectively. Both Rhia Ventures and Orchid Capital Collective are examples of that approach.
Rhia Ventures has been around longer. We knew we wanted a venture capital fund that focused specifically on contraception and maternal health. But at the time, that kind of fund didn’t exist. If it had, we would have just invested in it. Instead, we had to build it ourselves. We also recruited other like-minded philanthropists to help, so it wasn’t just Tara Health Foundation doing the work alone.
Once we had that infrastructure, we were able to attract many more limited partners (LPs). For example, we contributed about $1.5 million to build the infrastructure for the fund, and we were also an anchor investor with $5 million. That fund ultimately closed at $38 million. Thanks to both our donations and investment dollars, Rhia Ventures was able to bring in much more capital than we could have provided alone.
“We knew we wanted a venture capital fund that focused specifically on contraception and maternal health. But at the time, that kind of fund didn’t exist. Instead, we had to build it ourselves.”
Orchid Capital Collective is newer, and they haven’t gotten quite as far with it yet, but the principle is similar. It’s about bringing capital into maternal health, especially Black maternal health in the U.S. The key difference is that Rhia Ventures is a market-rate, for-profit fund, not compromising on financial returns, while Orchid is designed as a catalytic fund. That means they expect to be below market in terms of return and are intentionally recruiting philanthropic investors who are willing to be more patient or accept lower returns. I suspect that once Orchid gets up and running, it’ll use a stacked capital model. That means there will be space for philanthropists, concessionary capital, and also market-rate investors.
In both cases, Tara Health Foundation helped to create separate 501(c)(3)s to recruit other investors from the broader ecosystem, rather than relying solely on our own funds.
How do you see reproductive health access connecting to broader economic justice efforts?
It’s so central. If you look across all thematic areas that a philanthropist or impact investor might care about — whether it’s climate and the environment, poverty alleviation, clean water, or closing the wealth gap — there’s one lever that shows up in every single cause: women must be able to control how many children they have in order to optimize all these other outcomes.
There are great studies showing that one of the most effective interventions for addressing climate change is actually population control; specifically, giving women the tools to make choices about their families. And that’s true across the board. If you look at any of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, family planning is a key lever.
Even at the individual level, there’s no question: women and their families optimize their social and economic outcomes when they have access to family planning. And that doesn’t mean they have to have fewer children, it just means they have control over when they have them.
I want to emphasize that reproductive justice isn’t just about limiting family size. It also includes access to fertility treatments. It’s about the full spectrum of reproductive health and autonomy.
“Reproductive justice is about the full spectrum of reproductive health and autonomy.”
I want to talk a bit about your book The XX Edge: Unlocking Higher Returns and Lower Risk. Your book highlights the power of women controlling capital. What’s the main takeaway?
Patience Marime-Ball and I wrote The XX Edge because we both knew, based on our own portfolios, that we were outperforming the market not in spite of our gender-focused investment strategies, but because of them. We wanted to dig into the existing research to understand: was this just a fluke, or was there a real pattern?
What we found was a very clear pattern: when women are in control of capital, outcomes are better. And we define “better” in two ways. First, the financial outcomes: returns are stronger and the risk is lower. Second, the social outcomes are also better.
“When women are in control of capital, outcomes are better.”
Taking this even further, why is it important to have more women placed in decision-making roles if we are to close the gender wealth gap and design an economy that works for all people?
The answer to this question is a big part of why we wrote The XX Edge. Our primary goal was to demonstrate — especially to people who hadn’t been exposed to gender-focused investing, which often meant men — that putting women in control of capital wasn’t just the right thing to do, it was also the smart thing to do. It leads to better returns. That’s why we called the book The XX Edge, because it’s truly an edge. But we also learned, and the data supports this, that when women manage capital, they often make decisions that benefit not just themselves, but their families and communities as well.
A lot of this insight started with research on microfinance. You’ve probably heard the example: when women in places like Sub-Saharan Africa take out small business loans, maybe just a few hundred dollars, they’re more likely to spend it on their families, like sending their kids to school, or to reinvest in their communities, like setting up shared systems that help everyone. And this pattern holds at all levels. When a woman is CEO of a Fortune 500 company, she’s more likely to think about the sustainability of the supply chain or consider benefits for employees. Now, hiring a woman CEO doesn’t guarantee a smaller pay gap at the company; but again, the trends point in that direction.
“Putting women in control of capital wasn’t just the right thing to do, it was also the smart thing to do. “
Shortly after we published The XX Edge, a great study came out from Vanguard. They looked at 2,600 actively managed public market funds. These are funds where a team of people sit around a table and decide which companies to invest in, on behalf of trillions of dollars. The study categorized the gender makeup of those fund management teams — not the fund owners, but the actual managers making investment decisions. They sorted them into four groups: all male (which, not surprisingly, was the majority), all female (which was maybe 5%), mixed gender majority male, and mixed gender majority female.
The result? The mixed-gender majority female teams outperformed significantly. In fact, if the only thing you did was instruct your retirement account manager — at Vanguard, Fidelity, wherever — to avoid any fund managed by an all-male team, your portfolio would outperform by 50 basis points. That’s half a percent above market. And that’s without making any other decisions about geography, industry, or risk.
So to sum it up: when women are making capital decisions, portfolios tend to be stronger, returns are higher, there’s less risk, and there’s also greater social impact. But here’s the puzzle: with such strong evidence that women and gender diverse teams out perform, why do we assume that these are men’s roles. Ironically, women are asked to prove that they are good enough for these jobs. And that double standard is still very real.
“When women are making capital decisions, portfolios tend to be stronger, returns are higher, there’s less risk, and there’s also greater social impact.”
What are some other compelling pieces of evidence you’ve found that support these ideas?
When we talk about women as good investors, one of the reasons is that they tend to be closer to the problems the investments are trying to solve. Take women’s health, for instance. If you’ve got a room full of white men trying to decide what kind of maternal health product is going to reduce mortality among Black women chances are, they’re just not going to have a clue. And yet, that’s often who’s in the room making those decisions. So if you’re an investor and you believe this is an important market to invest in, why wouldn’t you want decision-makers who actually reflect the population you’re trying to serve?
“When we talk about women as good investors, one of the reasons is that they tend to be closer to the problems the investments are trying to solve.”
We talk about this in The XX Edge too, especially when it comes to innovation. One of my favorite examples is the Safetipin Company in India. Young women in New Delhi were fed up with the violence in their communities, especially gender-based violence, adapted Waze or Google Maps-style technology. They built a tool where people could input real-time information about their neighborhoods: things like a broken streetlight, an abandoned building where gangs hang out, or areas where recent attacks have happened. That way, women could adjust their routes on the way home to avoid higher-risk areas.
It was simple. It was brilliant. And it came from women who were living the problem and needed a solution that actually worked for them. And now, that tool’s been picked up and scaled by governments. That’s the kind of innovation you get when people closest to the problem are part of creating the solution, and it’s why it’s crucial that people who are closer to the problems need to be at the table to help find solutions.
WOMEN’S WAY believes firmly in addressing root causes to achieve gender equity. How is your work challenging traditional models to create lasting change?
One example that really ties back to the portfolio manager conversation, and was directly inspired by that Vanguard study, is the work we did at Tara Health Foundation to expose the demographic imbalance among portfolio managers.
Here’s the thing: we have compelling evidence that gender-diverse teams, particularly those that include women, consistently outperform. So we started reaching out to the biggest asset managers — Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Fidelity — the firms that are making decisions on trillions of dollars in assets. And we asked a simple question: What’s the demographic makeup of your portfolio management teams?
“We have compelling evidence that gender-diverse teams, particularly those that include women, consistently outperform.”
Now, these big banks manage thousands of funds. And right now, if you care about who’s managing your money, there’s no easy way to find that out. You’d have to go fund by fund, have your advisor ask around, and let’s be honest, who actually does that? Unless you’re incredibly motivated and have a full team of advisors, it’s basically inaccessible. We believe this information should be public. It’s material to how portfolios perform. Investors deserve to know.
But what we learned, just trying to publish this data, was that the asset managers themselves didn’t really care. The change wasn’t going to come from within the banks, it had to come from the demand side. The people holding the assets, the asset owners, needed to be the ones pushing for transparency.
That’s what led to the launch of the Diverse Investing Collective. We created a dashboard that finally shows the data: Of the $11.5 trillion in assets under management that we reviewed, only 17% is managed by teams that have at least 33% women on them. Seventeen percent. Out of $11.5 trillion. It’s wild. That’s exactly why this kind of visibility is so critical.
“The change wasn’t going to come from within the banks, it had to come from the demand side. The people holding the assets, the asset owners, needed to be the ones pushing for transparency.”
The theme of the WOMEN’S WAY 47th Annual Celebration is “Designing a Future for All.” What does that phrase mean to you, and what are some key changes you hope to see when it comes to gender equity and economic justice?
A lot of what I’ve already shared connects to this idea of designing a future for all. And if we focus on the financial system for a moment: how do we democratize access to investment opportunities?
We know the truth: you need money to make money. People with access to the stock market, to real estate, to retirement accounts — those are the people who are growing their wealth and building security. And those pathways remain incredibly difficult to access for huge portions of the population.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers. But take something like disrupting the portfolio manager level. It might sound niche, or even boring to some people. But the truth is, this is about money. Trillions of dollars. And it’s our money. This is deeply personal, and it affects every one of us. If we’re serious about changing systems, this is where it starts.
“This is about money. Trillions of dollars. And it’s our money. This is deeply personal, and it affects every one of us. If we’re serious about changing systems, this is where it starts.”
Some people will say capitalism itself can’t work for everyone. But I believe there’s real change to be made within the systems we have if we’re willing to push for it. And that includes things like policy reform and legislation to remove barriers that still keep women and people of color from full access. Even something as “simple” as being more vocal, demanding that the people managing our money reflect the diversity of our communities, that’s a powerful start. And it’s one we can act on right now.
In another interview, you discussed the importance of each of us realizing that “we are all investors.” What takeaway do you hope individuals reading this will carry with them?
I love this question because the truth is, that we’re all making financial decisions every single day. Where we shop, for example: Are we supporting a local business? Is it woman-owned? Is it a big chain? I’m not saying chains are inherently bad, but we have choices. And those choices can reflect our values. Even if you have a small retirement account, you can still ask questions: Who’s managing your money? What do their returns look like? What are they investing in? You have more power than you think.
This is also not just about personal finance. Voting is financial, too. Every time we vote, even at the local level, like for school board or city council, we’re shaping how public dollars get spent. That’s a form of investing. And it doesn’t take much to learn a little bit about the people making those decisions. From where we’re spending money, to where we are investing, to how we are voting, we’re all investors in shaping the future.
“From where we’re spending money, to where we are investing, to how we are voting, we’re all investors in shaping the future.”
