EQUALS-EU Gender Equity Tools
One of the main objectives of our project was to generate tools for gender equity and digital inclusion for businesses and organisations, namely EQUALS-EU Gender Equity Tools:
- Sustainable Social Impact Model
- Value Creation Model Canvas
Why are these tools necessary? Let the numbers speak: Currently 17% of the almost 8 million ICT specialists in Europe are women* and in 2022, women took only around 25% of the leadership positions in tech and 14% of the software engineering positions worldwide.**
This is a missed opportunity, because Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in businesses can lead to improved financial performance, increased innovation, enhanced employee satisfaction and positive company reputation.***
We hope to contribute to the reversing of this trend with these two gender equity tools, which represent the cumulative knowledge of the EQUALS-EU project and are prototypes available for anyone who wants to test and adapt to their own context.
* European Institute for Gender Equality
** Women in Tech Network
*** Diversity wins: How inclusion matters, McKinsey report, 2020
Sustainable Social Impact Model is a framework for anyone with a new or existing idea, product, or service to ensure gender-inclusive impact and digital inclusion.
It’s actually a worksheet to be filled in during a workshop with a facilitator and diverse set of participants.
The worksheet contains a matrix of questions to reflect on actions, initiatives, research and monitoring corresponding to:
- Value creation: meaningful engagement and positive impact towards user groups
- Social impact: addressing social challenges based on geography, culture, language
- Sustainable commercial growth: environmental, ethical and responsible practices
The outcome is an action plan where actions are set within a timeline and allocated to team members.
Value Creation Model Canvas is an overlay for the Business Model Canvas – a well-established strategic management and entrepreneurial tool to map your business model – adding four lenses for value creation.
Each lens comes with a set of trigger questions to be used in a workshop setting to reflect on how a business/organisation can create values alongside business development:
- Gender equity: Prompts on the provision of fairness and justice in the distribution of benefits and opportunities among all genders.
- Sustainable development: Prompts about considering sustainability across the whole value chain.
- Digital inclusion: Prompts to ensure equitable, meaningful and safe access to digital technologies, services and opportunities for everyone, everywhere.
- Inclusive design: Prompts leading to universal design by creating products, environments and systems that are accessible and usable by widest range of people regardless of their age, abilities or disabilities.
This tool aims to assist the businesses and organizations in developing a strategy for how their idea, product, or service can ensure that they are working towards improved digital inclusion and gender equity.
Check out the Instruction Manual to see the prompts and to learn more about how to use the tools.
EQUALS-EU Gender Equity Tools Presentation