United Nations EQUALS Global Partnership

The Leadership Coalition

The activities of the Leadership Coalition are designed to concretely address challenges that women in the tech sector tend to face systemically. Work spans five main areas of action including:

• Mobilization and building a professional network of women: Leveraging the Leadership Coalition network and regional support, partners will contact women entrepreneurs in tech to participate in EQUALS activities and connect women entrepreneurs with women leaders and role models in tech.
• Connecting women entrepreneurs to investors and funding: Includes identifying local initiatives for connecting entrepreneurs to investors, assessing and selecting women entrepreneurs to participate in events, and taking action to influence investment policy.
• Capacity-building: Partners will work together to identify training or workshops suitable for women entrepreneurs by region, and deliver workshops and e-learning courses on both hard tech skills and leadership skills including business development, access to finance, women’s economic empowerment and gender inclusivity.
• Advocacy: Activities will include a multi-stakeholder call for good practices, efforts to encourage tech companies to sign up to the UN Women’s Empowerment Principles, and creating a digital equality campaign.
• Policy recommendations: Partners will collaborate with the EQUALS Research Group to conduct research on how women and girls access and use ICTs in order to formulate policy recommendations for regulatory agencies and governments. 

The Coalition is initially focusing its efforts around a core group of pilot countries from Africa, Asia and the Middle East/North Africa. Through its activities, the Leadership Coalition will collect best practices and deliver evidence-based case studies to provide examples and suggestions on how to create and maintain equal opportunities for women in tech.

Coalition members herald from leading private and public sector organizations, and strive to empower women as ICT leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs through a range of actions that leverage their global presence and build on their own success stories including:

• Training and mentoring women to create tech businesses and readily assume leadership roles
• Facilitating better access to finance and funding through venture capital opportunities, angel investors and impact investors
• Identifying regulatory and policy barriers that are limiting women’s ability to access and monetize opportunities.

Why it matters

As award-winning actor and gender activist Geena Davis says, “If she can see it, she can be it.” The success of the EQUALS Leadership Coalition’s efforts will create a virtuous circle, creating greater numbers of female role models in tech who will in turn inspire the next generation of girls to aspire to tech leadership.

It’s time for women to take their place at the boardroom table. Making a difference in technology leadership is a powerful way to exert more profound change across the technology sector as a whole. Working together with you, the EQUALS Leadership Coalition will help create a balanced, diversity-friendly work environment where everyone, regardless of gender, has the chance to nurture their talents and shine.