The international Smart Advancing Women (iSAW) organization has announced the launch of its new global platform for professional women, LIFT (Learning and Intelligence For Tomorrow) on March 8th 2021, to coincide with International Women’s Day.
Powered by Unily, a UK-based leading enterprise digital workplace provider, LIFT is 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 – pioneering a distinctive and impactful change. The iSAW and Unily partnership seeks to leverage the power of technology to challenge the gender parity timeline and accelerate change.
According to the World Economic Forum, 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. Working together with Unily, iSAW has launched the LIFT platform 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,” asserts 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.”
The purpose of iSAW and the LIFT platform is to strengthen the position of women globally as a strategic talent pool and enhance each individual’s career: this is done by providing awareness on gender equality at a local, regional, and global level; arming members with the latest business knowledge in their industry and function; building their personal power; and creating an expansive international network for women to succeed in a bold new world in a bold new way.
- iSAW members will enhance their professional and personal power through interactions with each other and thought leaders, primarily via LIFT, nurturing a local and international iSAW community.
- The learning experience is underpinned by data analysis, insights, and benchmarks to highlight what ‘good looks like’ in gender equality, to shine a light on those organizations which excel, and illuminate the path to take for those wishing to improve.
- All members are driven by a values-based culture of constant striving to learn, lead and lift others.
“We are both proud and excited to be fuelling such a powerful platform,” commented Joanne Skilton, CCO at Unily. “It is hard to believe that gender equality in the workplace is still an issue in 2021. We are honored to be supporting iSAW, LIFT, in its pursuit of eradicating inequality and celebrating women globally. Technology can be a powerful tool when it comes to accelerating change and making a real difference. At Unily, we’ve seen it happen across the organizations and enterprises we work with, and now we see it in a different use case altogether. It’s exciting to see the full potential of our platform being unleashed and put to life-changing use.”
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 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. If you would like to learn more about iSAW’s services and how you can become a member, please visit https://isaw.org/.
