Ruth Shaber, MD, is an innovator and changemaker on a mission to change the face of finance. Her new book The XX Edge: Unlocking Higher Returns and Lower Risk, co-written with Patience Marime-Ball, Founder of Women of the World Endowment, makes a persuasive data-led financial case for investing with a gender and broader diversity lens. Ultimately when women make financial decisions and apply their skills across all capital markets, it leads to higher returns for individual investors and greater economic growth—a true win-win for all.

Prior to writing The XX Edge, Ruth founded Tara Health Foundation, which promotes health, well-being, and opportunity for women and girls through innovative evidence-informed programs. She is also the co-founder and board chair of Rhia Ventures, a group of foundations and investors that collaborate to bring new types of capital and enterprise to the field of reproductive health in the United States. Ruth had a robust career as an Obstetrician and Gynecologist with a focus on systems change at Kaiser Permanente from 1990 to 2012.

Ruth was featured in Forbes 2020 Impact 50: Investors Seeking Profit—and Pushing for Change for her contributions to the field of impact investing.

Patience Marime-Ball is the founder and CEO of Women of the World Endowment (wowendowment.org), 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 wrote The XX Edge: Unlocking Higher Returns and Lower Risk to highlight the missed opportunity when women are not in innovation labs, around capital allocation tables, and in decision making rooms.

In 2008 she was working in financial markets when the subprime crisis unfolded. It was the beginning of a deeper understanding of the value of women’s leadership. Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, said, “If it had been Lehman Sisters rather than Lehman Brothers, the world might well look a lot different today.” This was the start of a journey to review performance differences and the discovery that companies with gender-diverse leadership fared better with more stable earnings and stock prices relative to their peers. They also emerged from the crisis faster than peers without gender-diverse leadership.

Patience has more than two decades of investment experience across capital markets, including debt and equity financing, large scale infrastructure, distressed assets, as well as venture stage opportunities. She was Principal Investment Officer and Global Head of Banking on Women at the International Finance Corporation where she developed the Banking on Women multi-billion-dollar business; she co-developed the first-ever gender bond issued on the Uridashi market. She led the structuring of the first $600M global debt fund focused on women entrepreneurs.

Patience holds a JD from the Pritzker School of Law and an MBA from Kellogg at Northwestern University.