Making ‘Gender‐Lens Investing’ Work: Cultivating Proto‐Infrastructure for Alternative Financial Futures

This study examines how elites engage in prefigurative organizing and construct the institutional infrastructure for enacting alternative futures. We investigate their engagement in gender‐lens investing (GLI) within the global movement for gender equality in finance and investment. Using fuzzy‐set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 28 GLI mutual funds and exchange‐traded funds, we diagnose how fund managers combine available resources to prefigure GLI as investment products, identifying distinct configurations of symbolic, relational, and material resources through which GLI is enacted and made recognizable and actionable in the present. In doing so, we show that prefigurative efforts are not exclusive to grassroots activism, and demonstrate that the infrastructure supporting alternative practices is built through elites' efforts to recombine existing institutional resources into proto‐infrastructure. We therefore contribute a combinatorial perspective of prefigurative organizing that highlights the role of elites, and introduces proto‐infrastructure as a conceptual device for theorizing how prefigurative practices begin to acquire an incipient institutional form prior to the full consolidation of institutional infrastructure. This combinatorial perspective offers a new and timely lens for understanding GLI, impact investing, and the gender equality movement under current political backlash.