Introducing the Gender Evaluation Framework: A Rubric to Understand Venture Intent, Capability, and Commitment
A Guide to Creating More Gender-Equitable Outcomes in Underserved Markets
Co-authored by
The need for a specific Gender Evaluation Framework
For the last several years, the Last Mile Money Accelerator (LMMA) has been focused on supporting a community of emerging market entrepreneurs committed to creating financial impact at scale. We’ve learnt that although many of these innovations are designed to reach millions of people, they often end up excluding the most underserved communities — particularly women in rural areas.
This year, to address this, LMMA incorporated an active and intentional gender lens to our venture evaluation process. In partnership with Mansi Gupta, founder of Unconform and thought leader currently building Women-Centric Design — a framework and toolkit focused on intentionally and actively designing with and for women — we co-created a Gender Evaluation Framework.
We used the framework to ensure that the ventures we chose to support are actively committed to driving real change for women at the last mile. We are now sharing this framework broadly, with the hope to inspire a new dimension in how evaluation happens across venture funding and acceleration — ultimately helping to increase financial prosperity for the world’s most vulnerable.
Here’s how we created our Gender Evaluation Framework and how we think you can use it — or build on it! — to further financial inclusion within your own investing projects.
The gap in traditional gender lens investing
Gender lens investing (GLI) is not new. Gender practitioners have already created a myriad of powerful tools and frameworks that investors can use to apply a gender lens in their decision-making, such as the 2X framework, Seaf’s Gender Equality Scorecard Manual, and ICRW’s Gender-Smart Investing Resource Hub.
These tools evaluate organisational indicators such as pay equity, women’s workforce participation, gender diversity in leadership, safe workplaces, women-led supply chain vendors, etc. — as well as reach indicators, such as the % of women customers/users.
We simply cannot create gender-equitable outcomes without considering these important foundational goals and indicators. At the same time, we wondered how to further evolve the definition of GLI to be even more holistic. We asked ourselves: How might we understand the extent to which ventures are centering women in the way they design, develop, and scale their products and services? How might we spark their interest in centering women, simply by asking a few questions?
This led to a central question for our new framework:
How might we evaluate a digital finance venture’s intent, capability, commitment, and impact towards serving women’s needs at the last mile?
The Gender Evaluation Framework
The Gender Evaluation Framework, built around four pillars, represents key moments within the product lifecycle, from product discovery to product design, product strategy and product reach & results. Each pillar comes with criteria that can be evaluated against a relevant list of indicators; and questions that can spark conversation about each of the pillars.
Here’s why each of these pillars — intent, capability, commitment, and impact — matter.
1. Intent | Product Discovery
We must evaluate if and how ventures are engaging women during their research and discovery phase. If intent is missing, ventures risk misunderstanding the nuance and specificity of women’s needs and making assumptions about them. Furthermore, they risk blanketing women’s needs under the larger umbrella of needs of all underserved people.
Intent matters because it increases product teams’ understanding of root causes driving barriers that are unique to women.
For example, when IDEO Last Mile Money worked with the Pakistan-based lending startup Finja, we learnt that the hesitations behind actively seeking and applying for credit among men and women stemmed from different concerns. While men were more concerned about a potential loan being Islamic finance-compliant — for women who were also religious, the real fear stemmed from potentially leaving their families in debt without enough earnings. Without understanding this root cause, Finja would not have been able to serve their women customers.
2. Capability | Product Design
After intent, we must evaluate team capabilities of translating gender-lens insights into impactful features that solve for the specificity, variability and nuance in women’s lives. This might require looking for gender-driven design inspiration elsewhere or building experiences that are gender-holistic in nature. Without capability, we might end up with only the knowledge on what women need and, maybe at best, some ancillary activities or initiatives to address those needs, that sit outside of the core product and service. Thus, we can’t just have good intent — we need to be able to turn that intent into action.
Capability matters because it ensures that intent translates into gender-holistic action and products.
Building on the example of our work with Finja, it was important to respond to women’s mental models around debt. We designed messaging to build greater understanding and clarity among women that the loan would be repaid as they sell their products, and built in flexibility around the duration and tenure to match their sales cycles.
3. Commitment | Product Strategy
Beyond insights and action, we must also evaluate venture commitment to serving women in the long term. In cases where ventures might be intentional about understanding women, but do not actively design and implement strategies to reach women or fail to integrate gender-related success metrics into the venture’s overall KPIs, gender will likely fall off the agenda.
Commitment matters because it understands women’s success and ties it into overall product strategy and goals.
Oraan, an LMM accelerator startup, has actively defined metrics around women’s participation and usage of their product. They are committed to maintaining a ratio to ensure they always have a significant majority of women users to ensure creating a gender-holistic and women-centric neobank.
4. Impact | Results
Finally, we must keep our eyes on the actual results. Although it is difficult to make a real impact without intent, capability and commitment, it’s equally important that ventures continue to measure the results of their efforts, and shift strategies across the three pillars to actually reach, retain and drive real change for women.
Ready to get started? Dive into the Gender Evaluation Framework now.
Reflections on creating the Gender Evaluation Framework
Because we were lucky enough to iterate upon this first draft of the framework while applying it to the latest Last Mile Money Accelerator applicants, we’ve identified what worked well, and some areas for improvement:
What worked well
- The gender interview questions in our framework led to “show, not tell” answers. Ventures were able to go beyond theory and strategy and shared their real action to demonstrate their intent and capability of serving women.
- The framework is a new angle on gender inclusion for ventures: it became a way for them to tell a more powerful story and to start incorporating bits of the framework into their day-to-day to further their gender strategies.
- The framework is a new angle on gender inclusion for investors and incubators: it’s a way for them to think about gender-related impact beyond reach and numbers.
Areas for improvement
- How might the gender evaluation matrix feel more integrated to overall assessment, specifically with indicators such as revenue/PMF/traction/etc.?
- How might we put the framework into practice more strategically to inform product design and development? How might it feel more approachable and implementable like the Business Model Canvas?
- How might we be able to identify value being created for women among ventures that are designing with a gender-lens “by accident?”
- How might we include and align with existing gender evaluation frameworks and tools?
Calls to action for investors, accelerators, and others
For investors and accelerators: Test the framework in your due diligence, build on it based on your industry and domain, and consider making it more objective to create baselines others can benefit from.
For startup founders: Reflect on and tell your gender story in a more holistic way, from research to when an idea emerges to its validation to its final implementation and ultimate impact. If you find gaps, integrate the pillars in your process.
For the ecosystem at large: Can we start to think about women’s impact beyond reach? Are there other metrics that can be included in the gender framework to make it even more holistic?
For everyone: Please reach out to us if you have ideas on how to build and expand this framework, to make it more valuable to the community at large.
Ultimately, the Gender Evaluation Framework is a work in progress. We hope that it will continue to be used, refined, and ultimately bettered by others’ experience with it. To further these goals, we’d like to invite you to share your thoughts with us at lastmilemoney@ideo.com or mansi@unconformstudio.com.
