Jessica Menon

Updated March 2024

Gender inequality hurts the global economy

Gender inequality affects everyone, impacting economies, climates, and human security. It costs the global economy US$6 trillion annually and negatively affects organizations and nations as well as individuals. For example, gender-based violence reduces global GDP five percent annually due to lost productivity.

But traditional methods for analyzing gender-related data are often manual, time-consuming, labor intensive, and inaccurate. The challenge lies in conducting comprehensive gender analyses swiftly and effectively with high-quality data, including data sourced from community members and organizations in low- and middle-income countries.

AI-driven tools help identify gender issues faster and more cost-effectively

As a gender equity and social inclusion specialist, Jessica Menon evaluated the impact of programs and policies by combining existing data with real-world focus group interviews. “I’d look for employment opportunities or ways to mitigate the risk of gender-based violence in, for example, a road construction project,” she says.

Yet she often discovered that decision makers already had set their budgets by the time they read her reports. “They’d ask what they could do that didn’t cost anything,” she says. “I thought there must be a way to push analysis upstream before people make budget decisions.”

Combining two decades of experience in gender equality and social inclusion with a love of data analytics, Jessica founded Equilo to provide important gender-related analysis to development officials, investors, businesses and consultants before they set budgets and fund programs. The company’s advanced AI-based analytics tools make identifying gender issues faster, less costly, and more effective than traditional manual methods. “Equilo helps people find opportunities to create equality and equity whether they're working in a for-profit business, a humanitarian aid organization that’s responding to a crisis, or on an international development project,” Jessica says.

Equilo empowers more than 4,000 organizations to conduct better gender analysis

Today, Equilo’s subscription-based tools are helping more than 4,000 investors, humanitarian organizations, and businesses—including FinDev Canada and UNICEF—reduce by five to six weeks the time they need to collect, analyze, and report on gender data, saving about 90 percent of the costs of traditional manual methods.

Using Equilo products, entrepreneurs in Zambia have written successful funding applications that focus on gender. UNICEF has used Equilo to increase the safety of women and girls in conflict zones in Afghanistan and Ukraine. One bank in India, after using an Equilo assessment, increased female entrepreneurs’ access to financing by eliminating restrictive requirements that required husbands to sign loan agreements.

“Every time one of our customers tells me how they’re doing their work differently, I feel so motivated,” Jessica says. “I want Equilo to teach the world that if we focus on gender equality and social inclusion, we can be prosperous and have a world that we're proud of leaving to our children.”