Three things: Experience, Vision, and an Action-oriented approach.

Experience: Our team brings deep expertise working at the intersection of business, impact and sustainability. We’ve long noticed that the “S” in ESG (Environment, Social, Governance impacts) has been an after-thought for many companies. We’re here to provide actionable insights for companies to make meaningful progress.

We’ve also partnered with professionals who bring deep subject-matter expertise to our tools. Our Standards Advisory Board and our Board of Directors have a range of related professional and lived experiences that inform our work.

Vision: We have created a clear vision for what a “Gender IDEAL workplace” should look like. That vision is articulated in the Gender IDEAL Assessment, where we bring an intersectional lens to gender (and race, sexual orientation, transgender) to create the scaffolding of what a gender equitable and inclusive workplace looks like. This means companies that use the Gender IDEAL tools have a clear long-term vision of their goals and the support to make incremental progress toward reaching them.

Action-oriented approach: We root our work in providing insights that motivate companies to take action toward advancing their gender equity performance. Companies receive specific recommendations that can be implemented within 12 months along with the supportive infrastructure to make change. Progress can be tracked over time in the Gender IDEAL Assessment.

The assessment is designed to be:

Educational: As a free publicly-available tool, the assessment can be used by any workplace as a simple diagnostic and resource hub. For each topic area, we have identified relevant resources to support understanding of the issue and to start action steps towards improving assessment scores, including relevant research, practitioner examples and case studies to enable workplaces to understand why each of these practices and metrics matter and to gain insight into how they might integrate them into their own organization. The assessment is typically completed by someone who sits in a Human Resources/People/ Diversity & Inclusion role, though results should be shared with the whole organization.

Comprehensive: The Gender IDEAL assessment is a holistic evaluation of the factors that determine positive long-term outcomes on gender equity, equality and leadership opportunities. Equity focuses on ensuring a level-playing field and access, equality ensures fairness and fair treatment of employees and opportunity focuses on the ability to advance.

Tailored: The assessment is customized based on a workplace’s size (measured by number of workers and full-time equivalents), worker status (salary, hourly or both), and maturity (years in operation, a proxy of cultural development and entrenchment). These criteria inform which individual questions a company will see. Specific responses to questions also impact what additional questions are seen. For example, if a company has not performed a compensation/pay equity analysis, subsequent questions evaluating the scope of analysis and results of analysis will not appear.

Aspirational: The Gender IDEAL Assessment covers topics and individual policies, practices and data that map directly to the vision articulated by the Gender IDEAL goals.

The assessment is deliberately aspirational, designed to identify a range of actionable improvements through both absolute performance and comparative benchmark data. Only a few workplaces perform well across all Topic Areas and many organizations respond No or N/A to number of questions.

Informed by best-in-class practitioner and academic-led research: The Gender IDEAL Assessment was developed using a research-focused, multi-stakeholder process. The Gender IDEAL team relied on evidenced-based research to distill learnings on key activities, policies, behaviors that have had a demonstrated positive impact on organizations’ equity and equality work. Distilling this research created the framework for the Gender IDEAL assessment and informed the topics, key practices and individual questions that are included.

We have mapped the Gender IDEAL Assessment to current frameworks including the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles, Bloomberg’s Gender Equality Index, HRC Corporate Equality Index, Equileap’s Framework, the Edge Certification process and B Lab’s SDG Action Manager for SDG5. Mappings indicated alignment in approach and topics covered, though the Gender IDEAL Assessment focuses on practices that can impact workplace culture more than other frameworks.

Evolves over time: Our goal is to maintain consistency of data for benchmarking and research purposes while ensuring the standards evolve based on new research and user feedback. The assessment framework will be updated annually to integrate feedback from experts, feedback from companies that take the assessment, and what the data itself shows.

Data security and data privacy is critical to our business model. We never share any of the data provided to us by companies in any way that is identifiable.

The only time data is identifiable is when it is shared back to the company that submitted it. Otherwise, data is used anonymously and in aggregate for benchmarking purposes and in research reports issued by Gender IDEAL. Read more about our privacy policy and terms of use.

We have had more than 40 companies complete the Gender IDEAL assessment, 38 of whom have opted for a Benchmark & Recommendation Report. We’ve also had more than 50 companies use our IDEAL 12 assessment to start their journey toward becoming more gender equitable. We anticipate these numbers will double by the end of 2022.