The international Smart Advancing Women (iSAW) organisation will launch a global platform for professional women, LIFT (Learning and Intelligence For Tomorrow), on March 8th to coincide with International Women’s Day.
Powered by Unily, LIFT is described as an ‘innovative learning and intelligence habitat for women to collaborate and hone their professional and technical skills and personal power in order to advance in the business world’.
The iSAW and Unily partnership seeks to leverage the power of technology to challenge the gender parity timeline and accelerate change.
iSAW cites data from the World Economic Forum, which says we will not see gender parity in our lifetimes, with estimates showing it will be on average another 99.5 years, and for some countries over 200 years.
iSAW’s goal is to accelerate gender equality worldwide, bringing this number down. The LIFT platform aims to unite women from around the world to build on female empowerment, professionalism, and personal growth, using technology as a vehicle for supporting enterprises and individuals to overcome gender disparity in the workplace.
Using next-generation targeting features traditionally used by business enterprises to drive employee engagement, iSAW will leverage the same technology to give members access to the specific knowledge and expertise they need to make a difference in their arena.
The LIFT platform uses Unily’s technology to target members’ professional interests, providing interactive access to international thought leaders, subject matter experts and global networks to enhance their career fulfilment and raise their awareness on gender parity opportunities across the globe. iSAW also holds local and global events and workshops to engage with its international audience.
“I choose to challenge that gender equality will not be achieved within 100 years,” said Nancy Speidel, iSAW Founder and CEO. “We all know the power of technology can change the world; iSAW is excited to be partnering with Unily to launch our LIFT platform, bringing the full force of Unily’s award-winning digital technology, converted to multiple languages, to address gender inequality in the workplace in a way never done before.”
Founded by Nancy Speidel, a senior leader in Information Technology, and co-founded by Ebtehal Alrewaily, an international scholarship recipient with a masters in Physic, and Lynn O’Connor, a diversity and inclusion director, iSAW says it thrives on a combination of their areas of expertise, creating an innovative digital solution to expedite the advancement of gender equality.
The iSAW Foundation is chaired by Martin Elliot, VP of Information Technology, who also brings a wealth of experience in technology and is a champion for gender equality.
iSAW is currently working with nine Universities and over 300 students to support its efforts and create content for its GRID – Gender Research Insights Database.
