Gender Knowledge Lab Helps Companies Drive Inclusion To Grow Their Business

Offers new tools to succeed at applying a gender perspective to policies, products, and investments 

NEW YORK, DEC. 2, 2022 – Nonprofit Pro Mujer has announced the general availability of the Gender Knowledge Lab, a new research, training, and consulting initiative to help public and private organizations take a gender approach that succeeds at improving their work environments, increasing innovation, and achieving better financial results. 

Gender equality and team diversity are major opportunities for economic growth. The International Labor Organization (ILO) has published a report showing that raising women to decision-making positions can increase business profitability, innovation, and talent attraction by up to 20%.

The new lab has already made available two new powerful platforms, for organizational self-assessment and gender-lens investing, and offers consulting services.  

The first platform is the ILU Toolbox, developed with Deetken Impact thanks to the support of USAID. It is available to all companies interested in harnessing the potential of gender equality to improve their competitive position and work environment. The ILU Toolbox helps companies self-assess and then apply four different gender lenses: women in leadership, workplace equity, products and services that benefit women and girls, and value-chain equity and advocacy. 

The second offering is the Gender Platform, a toolset created together with Acrux Partners, also with USAID support. It’s an open-source platform specifically designed for financial institutions and investors, which provides all the necessary resources to develop corporate policies, design products, and invest—with a gender perspective. This knowledge hub includes a map to track investments, a self-assessment to help users identify where their companies can significantly impact gender equity, and an interactive library with over 100 tools.

The new Gender Knowledge Lab also offers consulting services. It is a series of comprehensive technical assistance services tailored to the needs of each client organization to support its staff in developing solutions that comply with international standards, like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and other environmental, social, and governance criteria. Consulting services can also help strengthen female leadership, promote equality in the workplace, develop products and services that benefit women and girls, access resources to prevent and respond to possible harassment, sexism, and gender-based violence, and incorporate a gender-lens approach to each organization’s communications and marketing.

These are other services and initiatives of the Gender Knowledge Lab:

– Gender and diversity diagnosis: Self-assessment and expert-guided evaluation to create improvement routes. It has been held in over 15 financial, corporate, and entrepreneurial organizations with notable impact. 

– Training: Comprehensive workshops on gender, inclusion, diversity, and organizational culture change, for managers and individual contributors. Seven hundred people have already taken training.

– Knowledge creation and transmission: Research, reports, specialized mapping, and sector analysis, including gender data collection and hosting of working groups and communities of practice.

– Events: For example, the GLI LATAM 2022 Forum, held November 7-10 in Antigua, Guatemala, hosted the most significant inclusion and diversity references and experts in the world of investment, entrepreneurship, and research.

Pro Mujer is a leading social enterprise creating mechanisms to close gender gaps, as shown by its recent incorporation into the 2X Collaborative network of organizations, which seeks to promote Gender-Lens Investing around the world. 

The Gender Knowledge Lab team is composed of Natalia Wills Gil, Global Manager of Representation and Gender at Pro Mujer; Carol Pinzón, Coordinator of Gender, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; and the Area Coordinator, Tomás González Bergez, an expert in development and integration issues. 

To learn more about Pro Mujer, please visit https://promujer.org.