We continue this week with our second piece on better understanding equity. If you missed last week’s opening describing our relationship to equity and a number of LGBT-focused organizations from which we learn, work with, and admire, be sure to go back to read it.
As a women-owned company with a majority female team, Starfish Impact is particularly interested in meeting the needs of women and female-identifying individuals in our work. In the US social sector, nearly three quarters of all employees are women. Despite that, women fill less than 20% of the leadership roles. Beyond the social sector, we see equally disturbing statistics, from boardrooms to venture capital funding, failing to meet the needs of and fully incorporate women. To that end, we are happy to shine a light on the following organizations that work in the gender equity space for each of us to learn more about and to learn from.
Gender Equity
Parity.org exists to close the gender gap at the highest levels of business, where the gender gap is most acute. They advocate for women’s representation in the C-Suite and on the Board of Directors. Parity.org does this by promoting companies that demonstrate their commitment to gender parity, raising awareness about underlying issues, and providing facts and research that show the value in equal representation. They ask companies to take the ParityPledge® to commit to simply interview at least one qualified woman for every open role, VP and higher—including the C-Suite and the Board.
Number five of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals is to achieve gender equality and to empower all women and girls. To that end, they believe that gender equality is not only a fundamental human right, but a necessary foundation for a peaceful, prosperous and sustainable world. The United Nations serves as a center of shared goal setting, progress monitoring and evaluation, and works in global partnership with all Member countries in achieving these goals.
Gender Justice is a nonprofit legal and policy advocacy organization devoted to addressing the causes and consequences of gender inequality, both locally and nationally through impact and strategic litigation, policy advocacy, and public education and training.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through fact-based research and analysis to help individuals, families, and communities throughout the world be safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. They produce research on gender discrimination including recent reports on the integration of women in US Special Ops Forces and several reports addressing sexual assault and sexual harassment in the US military,
Equality Now helps advance women’s and girls’ rights, because when women and girls, men and boys are treated equally, everyone wins. They focus on ending harmful practices, ending sex trafficking, ending sexual violence, and achieving legal equality.
Gender at Work envisions a world that values and respects women’s human rights and cultures of equality, especially gender equality. They understand that to change systems of power that hold inequality in place, relationships between people, institutions and organizations have to shift.
The ACLU works to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States. Under their women’s rights issue area, they focus on pregnancy and parenting discrimination, violence against women, women’s rights in the workplace, women’s rights in education, and women and criminal justice.
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