Incorporating an organisational gender lens with Empodera 360
Tell us a bit about Empodera 360.
Empodera360 is creating a financial and support mechanism to invest and grow women’s health ventures in Latin America. We ensure that venture needs are met, not just financially – but also in other ways. It is built in 3 phases:
Mapping: In this first phase, we map what different enterprises and ventures are solving for, what kinds of services or products they offer, and what their current funding needs are.
Technical Assistance phase: In the second phase, we invite ten social enterprises into an accelerator program and provide them assistance in 5 key areas: legal & financial, social impact, gender lens, access to healthcare and performance optimization.
Financial mechanism: In the last phase, we design a financial mechanism to invest in such ventures. This phase is still a work-in-progress and being designed to make sure that it meets the needs of specific enterprises given their stage and cultural context.
What is the women’s and/or gender lens at Empodera 360?
We see our role as being a catalysing force to improve health for women – holistically. This begins with the selection and mapping phases. When we say women’s health, we mean going beyond reproductive health. So we support organisations that are, for example, broadening their services to serve women; or data-driven companies that are using sex-disaggregated data to create change; or organisations that are creating awareness and support systems for gender-based-violence.
In the mapping phase, we took a holistic organisational approach to evaluate where different enterprises were in their gender mainstreaming. It wasn’t just about working with female-founded or all-female enterprises, or those that focus on serving women or providing products exclusively for women.
Within organizations and companies, there are a few commonly employed metrics related to gender equality: how many female employees, female founders, female leaders etc. We’re taking a more holistic approach with our gender lens. We’re using the ILU Toolkit, which provides a number of human-centered-design tools to evaluate and design your internal organisational structures in addition to products and services and supply chain. Our goal is to mainstream the gender lens throughout all aspects of the enterprises we work with.
What are some learnings and insights from your process of designing the Empodera360 experience with a gender lens?
Defining your gender lens will be a difficult process, but stick with it
Defining how you will embed “a gender lens” into your project is not an easy question to answer. It might be difficult to have agreement on this in your internal team or organization, let alone in the ecosystem, because there is so much disagreement worldwide about what a gender lens is. We’ve found this in supporting our enterprises – especially because no two organisations are the same, we have to understand and co-define what the gender lens might mean for them. For some it might be about having an all-female team and for others it might be a commitment to having a strong gender commitment in their data insight analysis. While this is difficult, it also has positive aspects to it – because if we were able to easily agree on what a gender lens is, then we might not be solving the full problem.
Finding the right structure of success metrics is complex
Something else we struggle with is defining our targets and benchmarks. Is it about having x number of female founders in our cohort? If yes, what is the right number? If not, will it even be considered truly impactful? There is no one-size-fits-all. For us, the process of finding the right metrics has been about constantly checking ourselves to ensure that we’re not using the “idea” of a gender lens with rigid numbers, but rather ensuring that our bias is towards supporting women rather than excluding men.
About Paulina Pérez and Anna De La Cruz
Paulina Pérez is Project Manager of Empodera 360º at New Ventures. In this position, she heads the alliance with partners and manages the acceleration program for social enterprises, as well as the design of the financial mechanism. She has a law degree and a background in corporate law in M&A and Estate Planning.
Anna De La Cruz is a social impact consultant and part of the Linked Foundation and Empodera 360 teams. Her background is in evaluation of social impact, global health, social enterprise and investing in women. She has a Masters in Public Administration from NYU, and is currently based in Seattle.