In conversation with Renée Chenault Fattah

In The XX Edge, Patience Marime-Ball and Ruth Shaber envision a new paradigm of gender-focused investing where more women are placed in decision-making roles and able to optimize their skills across all capital markets—leading to higher returns for individual investors and greater economic growth.

Patience Marime-Ball is the founder and CEO of Women of the World Endowment, an investment nonprofit focused on centralizing women changemakers as economic, environmental, and social changemakers while delivering market-rate, risk adjusted returns and impact at scale. She has more than two and half decades of investment experience across capital markets – including debt and equity financing, large scale infrastructure, distressed assets, as well as venture stage opportunities. Patience has led many “firsts” in the investing space; she developed the Banking on Women platform at the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and was responsible for co-designing IFC’s multi-billion dollar Global Trade Liquidity Program, as well as the first-ever gender bond issued on the Uridashi market.

Ruth Shaber is the founder and president of the Tara Health Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes and invests in programs aimed at health, well-being, and opportunities for women and girls. She is also the co-founder and board chair of Rhia Ventures, a group of foundations and investors devoted to reproductive health in the United States, and was a gynecologist and obstetrician at Kaiser Permanente for 22 years. Selected as a Forbes 2020 Impact 50: Investors Seeking Profit—and Pushing for Change for her work in impact investing, Shaber, is also the founder of the Women’s Health Research Institute.

A former longtime co-anchor of the WCAU NBC 10 News, Renée Chenault Fattah also worked at several other stations across the country and as a lawyer at the New York firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed. She serves on the board of directors of Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity and on the board of trustees of Johns Hopkins University, and in 2020 was inducted into the Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia Hall of Fame.