The Multiplier Effect
How iSAW and Ascent Growth Partners are Helping Organizations Leverage Gender Equality in Pursuit of Better Business Outcomes
Through their strategic partnership, iSAW, international Strategic Accelerator for Women, and Ascent Growth Partners are focused on acting as a catalyst for the innovation, mindset and behaviours required to close the gap on gender equality in the workplace and realize the untapped economic value that will inevitably come from better business outcomes, including improved ESG performance. Their report, Gender Equality: A Catalyst for Accelerating ESG Outcomes and Beyond provides the research data, roadmap and reasoning behind their goal to improve the economic gender equality timeline by 10x.
“Companies are uniquely positioned to accelerate gender equality for women in the workplace, creating a collective impact on a global scale that would have a ripple effect to accelerate all aspects of ESG and wider aspects of business performance. Therefore, companies must break from the current status quo … to create visionary innovations and mindsets to be used as a catalyst to educate, elevate and empower women at all levels within their organizations and more broadly within their communities and society at large,” the report notes.
To get there, the report outlines three key steps. First, a major mindset shift that is future-focused, driven by long-term objectives and embraces the data-driven insights that demonstrate gender equality positively impacts leading indicators.
Second, organizations need to institutionalize gender equality, integrating it into company culture and objectives as a strategic lever to tackle current and future business challenges. Ultimately, gender equality must be elevated beyond a DEI initiative to a business performance imperative. To achieve this, companies need to cultivate and sustain work environments for women at all levels to thrive and implement processes that attract women to the workforce and allow them to realize their full potential.
Finally, organizations need to be part of the collective impact, by sharing success stories showing how an increased focus on gender equality leads to better business outcomes, including the delivery of ESG outcomes and becoming part of a community of change agents to help create accelerated progress.
To help companies in their pursuit of these outcomes, iSAW and Ascent have developed an approach which leverages gender equality to create intermediary business outcomes that lead to business value, with a clear investment case that can give business leaders the confidence they need in allocating capital, knowledge and human resources to achieve significant benefits. They’ve dubbed this approach the multiplier effect.
It includes an integrated set of accelerator services, including diagnostics and benchmarking, leadership interventions and a digital platform of curated learning communities, which together allow enterprises to determine which strategic business outcomes they want to impact and how to leverage gender equality and other aspects of their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda to maximize those outcomes.
To read more: ESG Gender Equality Report