She Go Say
- Pre-Seed
She Go Say directly challenges gender bias in the workplace by providing a confidential platform for women to rank their employers without fear of backlash. The anonymized individual reviews and aggregate rankings will be publicly available – providing a research tool for job applicants and an assessment tool for companies.
For centuries, women have been portrayed as the "weaker sex"; fueling the argument for gender defined roles - both domestically and professionally. Women are increasingly fighting for equality in the workplace as gender bias has been found to lead to a loss of productivity, motivation, and morale.
While laws are in place in Western countries to protect women from retaliatory action from their employers when they report gender discrimination, for the working African woman, these laws do not widely exist. Team She Go Say provides a platform to track gender bias in companies from the perspective of women employees.
Our solution focuses on protecting the working African woman while encouraging discussions on gender bias in the workplace; allowing women to post their reviews and rankings anonymously, with their private information kept secure. There is considerable evidence that humans divulge more easily to a computer than a person (Buchanan, 2002). By using our solution to birth this subject, we are exploring a very important first step in addressing gender bias.
The target outcome is to reduce gender bias in the workplace by encouraging companies to look inwards and revamp their existing policies if needed - based on feedback from their women employees. The initial impact of our solution will be measured from the rate of use of the platform, open discussion on gender bias and the coverage (location) of use.
This solution will directly benefit women employees, women job applicants and employers. It will be deployed as a web-based platform compatible with mobile phones; past research shows that the Internet is predominantly accessed via a mobile device across the globe.
Track number of rankings by unique users - 5,000 women rank their employers within 1 year of deployment
Track number of unique companies ranked - 200 companies are ranked within 1 year of deployment
Track total number of daily and monthly visits - 100,000 visitors to the website within 1 year of deployment
- Adult
- Lower middle income economies (between $1006 and $3975 GNI)
- Bachelors
- Female
- Urban
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Consumer-facing software (mobile applications, cloud services)
- Digital systems (machine learning, control systems, big data)
She Go Say allows women to directly research a company on how it meets their work/life balance needs. It leverages existing technology but its design is tailored to users in developing countries - easy to use, simple interface and low data usage.
The focus of this solution is to improve the discussions on gender bias in environments where it is against the norm to talk about it. Other solutions do not readily offer information on a company publicly. Also, a company is listed once regardless of the location of the office.
By leveraging the Internet, our solution can be easily accessed by millions of women across the globe. We are particularly targeting women in Africa; our solution is designed to be accessed over low-speed broadband. We are designing a platform that is easy to use and navigate. We intend to roll out a pilot, with 50 pilot testers from Nigeria. The final product will be rolled out after incorporating feedbacks from the pilot testers.
Our solution will be provided at no extra cost to the target users. It will be deployed on the Internet and will be accessible through web browsers on a PC or mobile phone. As data rates and the cost of smartphones continue to decline, and mobile adoption and Internet penetration grows, deploying solutions via the Internet reaches more people.
- 0 (Concept)
- Non-Profit
- United States
The research and pilot stages of the solution will be funded from personal savings and donations from friends and families of the team. Operating and scalability costs are expected to be covered by this source of funds. However, at the growth stage, when we will be looking to expand outreach through advertisements, - given that we are targeting a globally sensitive issue - we intend to accept funds from global non-profits, crowd funding, and governments.
The factors we have identified as having the possibility to limit our success currently and in subsequent stages of developing and implementing this solution are:
- Funding - we need finance to build the website and advertise the solution to the target audience
- Advertisement - we need to ensure that the target users are aware of the solution
- Trust - beyond being aware that this platform exists, the target users need to trust that their confidentiality is protected and the solution can effect the needed change
- Less than 1 year
- 3-6 months
- 6-12 months
- Financial Inclusion
- Bias and Heuristics
- Future of Work
We recognize that societal and global challenges cannot be solved in its entirety by one individual, organization or sometimes industry. Some challenges require more than partnerships; they also require multiple solutions addressing different aspects of the problem.
We are applying to become a Solver in order to address a critical first step in fighting gender bias. We will leverage the resource of leaders, experts, and mentors within the Solve community in every aspect of developing and implementing our solution. In particular, we would work closely with the community to ensure our solution is designed for the target users.
We do not have any partners currently.
In our initial target markets, we do not have any competitors. In the US; www.fairygodboss.com