Equality Spell Check

Challenge

Women still face significant inequalities in the workplace, with more needing to be done to improve gender diversity and inclusion. This is especially true in the MENA region, which loses $575 billion a year due to social barriers for women at work.

Inspiration

After extensive research, we realized the main issue in the workplace is that some words don't mean the same thing for women as they do for men. For example, seniority for a man means authority, but for 64% of women it means having their abilities questioned constantly. To highlight this problem, we wanted to target people at work in an attention-grabbing way that simply couldn’t be ignored. So, we chose to hack something that people at work use every day, MS word.

Idea

To highlight the challenges women face at work, we turned to the most used program in the world, MS Word. By using hard-hitting facts, data, and programming, we showed people how many positive workplace words have a different meaning for women than for men, creating a teaching tool while raising awareness.

Growth

We developed an innovative detection plug-in for MS Word that highlighted specific words as incorrect, then revealed how they mean something different for women. It was activated internally and by 6 partners. We then targeted the public with content on social media leading to our website where they could download the plug-in themselves and learn how to tackle gender inequality in their workplace.