Jury President
Jenifer Clausell Tormos
2021 CWI Fellow, CEO & Founder of Develop Diverse
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Award
Jenifer Clausell Tormos
Jenifer Clausell-Tormos is a scientist and entrepreneur. She is fascinated by the power technology has to scale and accelerate processes to positively and sustainably impact our society and people’s well-being.
Jenifer holds a Ph.D. in Technology Development. She held positions both at universities and in the industry as a scientific researcher. In her career, she first leveraged tech to accelerate the process of finding new medicines. After 10 years, her drive for gender balance and diversity brought her to use her tech expertise to close the gender and diversity gap by founding Develop Diverse. For 5 years+, Jenifer has been a researcher, speaker, and trainer in the field of Diversity & Inclusion.
She founded Develop Diverse in 2017 after realizing that gender roles were still prominent in her generation. Jenifer knew this was a thing in her mom’s generation but not in younger generations, where women generally had higher education and a higher degree of economic independence than ever.
Jenifer has taken a different path than many other start-up founders, and not only because of her gender but because she built a long career in biotechnology with a PhD in Chemistry and tech. After spending 10 years of her professional career in research and in industry, she set out to change the status quo of how unconscious bias training is delivered and speed up the process of having companies reflect the diversity that is found in society per default.
Jenifer says about the time “I wanted to help every single person unlearn their unconscious biases, so we could break down stereotypes in just a few decades rather than wait another hundred years. Unconscious bias trainings were the method most used to do that, and clearly, it was not enough given that the diversity numbers had not changed much in the last 100 years. I decided to use tech to accelerate the process. In my career, I always used tech to accelerate the process of finding new medicines for specific diseases, so why not to use tech to close the diversity gap?”
About Develop Diverse
Develop Diverse was founded in Denmark in 2017 with the vision to create equal opportunities by communicating inclusively using tech. Develop Diverse enables companies to build diverse and inclusive workplaces by ensuring they attract and retain diverse talent and unlearn their biases. It is a unique software solution based on international research and ML/NLP that removes biased language in corporate's communication content (around gender, age, ethnicity, LGBTQ+, neurodiversity, and physical disability) and also educates the user through the language they type daily. It is used by companies in more than 35 countries across 5 continents. Amazon is one of their customers, and they have experienced a 3x increase of qualified diverse applicants when using Develop Diverse. They raised €2.5M last August 2021, a diverse team growing from 24 to 31 people in the coming 3 months.