Our Innovation Analysts recently looked into emerging technologies and up-and-coming startups working on innovative solutions to tackle conscious and unconscious gender bias. As there is a large number of startups working on a wide variety of solutions, we want to share our insights with you. This time, you will discover 6 promising gender equality solutions.
Heat Map: 6 Top Gender Equality Solutions
Using our StartUs Insights Discovery Platform, covering 1.379.000+ startups & scaleups globally, we looked at innovative solutions that close the global gender gap. For this research, we identified 620 relevant solutions and picked 6 to showcase below. These companies were chosen based on a data-driven startup scouting approach, taking into account factors such as location, founding year, and relevance of technology, among others. Depending on your specific criteria, the top picks might look entirely different.
The Global Startup Heat Map below highlights 6 startups & scaleups developing innovative gender equality solutions. Moreover, the Heat Map reveals regions that observe a high startup activity and illustrates the geographic distribution of all 620 companies we analyzed for this specific topic.
Equalista – Gender Equality Learning App
Analyzing and understanding the root causes of gender inequality is the first step in achieving gender equality. Gender discrimination affects all women irrespective of race, wealth, income level, and occupation. Further, the ingrained discrimination against women, which stems from generations of curtailment, makes it difficult for societies and organizations to draft and implement gender-neutral policies. Startups tackling gender discrimination develop innovative tools to increase awareness about this global issue.
German startup Equalista is building the Equalista, a gender equality learning app that helps users discover why inequality exists, what it looks like, how to talk about gender, and to test user biases to eventually impact change in the real world. Equalista provides knowledge about the more subtle forms of gender bias and creates awareness about existing stereotypes, unconscious biases, and deep-rooted beliefs. The solution uses gamification techniques to change perpetrators’ behavior and to help victims manage the situation for a positive outcome.
Pequenos Amos de Casa – Inculcating Gender Equality in Children
It is increasingly apparent that notions of equality have to be cultivated in people from an early age. Despite the global prevalence of ‘woke’ culture, it is the subconscious or unconscious biases that typically lead to unequal treatment. The most effective way to remove socially-conditioned bias against womxn is to sensitize young children about gender identities. Therefore, parents increasingly seek high-quality technology solutions to inculcate open-minded behavior and a better understanding of gender in their children.
Spanish startup Pequenos Amos de Casa inculcates co-responsibility and gender equality in young children and adolescents through housework. The startup’s techniques reinforce concepts of punctuality, constancy, order, and time management to bring understanding to gender roles. The Little Housekeepers solution provides parents and schools with a simple, yet powerful, approach to tackle unconscious gender biases. Children participating in such programs also have an impact on their families’ and societies’ attitudes towards gender both in the short and long term.
Pipeline Equity – Eliminating Unconscious Gender Bias
The facts presented in the UN Women website make for grim reading. Global female participation in the labor force, or the lack thereof, remains a massive challenge for achieving global gender equality. Proactive measures are required to increase the number of women joining work. To this end, technology and data-driven solutions detect unequal practices in organizations and recommend a possible course of correction. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based tools are particularly useful for large organizations with skewed gender ratios.
Pipeline Equity is a US-based startup offering businesses its Pipeline platform for gender equity. Pipeline integrates with companies’ cloud-based human capital management systems to analyze a series of triggered events. The platform then gives recommendations to support growth for individual employees, as well as improved financial performance for the organization. Pipeline’s smart triggers help companies connect gender equity and the financial outcomes associated with it.
Think Yellow – Gender Lens Investing
The slow and gradual rise in the number of women joining the workforce opens up valuable insights into the benefits of a gender-balanced workplace. When it comes to innovation and investment, the gender gap yawns even further apart. This prompts female investors to focus on gender equality solutions. Similar to helping build up any industry or sector, a multi-pronged approach is required to achieve gender equality in the near future. From technology-driven solutions to removing recruitment biases and promoting inclusive workplaces, startups are competing for these investments from female investors.
Think Yellow is a Swiss company taking a gender-based approach to investing. The venture capital (VC) firm forms partnerships to co-create products and ensure everyone can invest with a gender lens. Think Yellow diverts more money towards enabling gender equality, one of the major UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The company helps investors find sustainable and socially-conscious companies that make gender-balanced decisions.
equilo – Gender Equality & Social Inclusion Analysis
While many traditional thinkers do not believe it, the economic benefits of employing more women outweigh the alternative. The key challenge lies in the sheer scale at which behavioral change needs to occur. Whichever way gender discrimination is tackled, most of the core principles remain the same. The universality in approaches enables startups to develop technology-driven solutions to help organizations make improved business decisions while considering gender.
Based in the US, equilo develops a web-based application for customized gender equality and social inclusion analysis, as well as recommendations and action plans. The solution is suitable for use in 20 global sectors including agriculture, energy, defense, urban planning, and education. Equilo Dash, a data-driven tool, explores the overview of 30 dimensions and 15 thematic areas of gender inequality to better understand gender discrimination. The tool utilizes a proprietary algorithm, powered by an analytical framework based on the Transforming Agency, Access, and Power (TAAP) framework. The solution enables an automated, customized, social, and gender analysis for any organization.
myrna labs – Gender Intelligence
Why should companies care about becoming gender-aware in terms of organizational strategy and growth? The answers lie in gender intelligence building. Empowering women through employment impacts both the individuals and their societies. Moreover, understanding the extent of bias and the dangers of non-action urges companies to fill the knowledge-gap of gender equality and social inclusion. Ultimately, everyone from decision-makers and business leaders to individuals plays a key role in implementing gender-balanced practices and acting on the valuable insights that gender intelligence provides.
Indian startup myrna labs works on gender intelligence tools and solutions enabling leaders and decision-makers to find compelling insights on growth and inequality. The startup performs gender intelligence on firms, markets, management of natural disasters, and global challenges. Additionally, the startup quantifies the risk to business arising from unequal gender practices. Further, myrna labs develops gender-integrated firmographic databases to design gender-intelligent solutions for all kinds of organizations.
What About The Other 614 Solutions?
While we believe data is key to creating insights it can be easy to be overwhelmed by it. Our ambition is to create a comprehensive overview and provide actionable innovation intelligence and enable you to achieve your goals faster. The 6 gender equality-enabling solutions showcased above are promising examples out of the 620 we analyzed for this article. To identify the most relevant solutions based on your specific criteria, get in touch.
