The Story Behind The First Gender Equity AppExchange App

"In 2015, 90% of new CEOs had sales experience. 100% of them were men. If we want to accelerate the time to close the gender equity gap, then sales is a key accelerator, but that’s only the beginning," shares Pipeline Founder and CEO, Katica Roy, in a recent interview with AppExchange. Katica is explaining that gender equity is often equated to women, but that’s 50% of the conversation. Gender equity impacts men as well.

Two people decided to tackle the gender equity gap head on with technology. The new solution is called Pipeline, and it uses AI to increase financial performance by closing the gender equity gap.

Recently, fellow AppExchange team member Melanie Picard sat down with Katica Roy, as well as CTO Stefan Ramsbott, to hear the story behind Pipeline, how it works, and what’s next.

Why is it so important that you have a co-founding team that’s diverse?

Katica: We focus on gender equity. Often times gender equity is equated to women’s equality but women are 50% of the conversation, men are the other 50%. When we look at the numbers, not only do men hold the majority of leadership positions, also 48% of working fathers would like to stay home but can’t. Including men in the conversation is important because gender inequity impacts them as well.

How did it all start?

Stefan: Katica approached me about the gender equity vision, and was picking my brain about how we could carry it out using technology. I was interested in being a part of the conversation. This is not a battle of the sexes. It is a truly a leveling of the playing field, and about rewarding talent over people. Technology wise, it’s a massive opportunity to create a market, and take on a drastic need in this space.

Stefan: Our recent launch ties data analytics and our algorithmic work into the front end UI of the full platform. The interactions with the platform and recommendation engine of talent allows people managers to see the effects of their hiring decisions on the path toward parity and gender equity.

Tell us how it works.

Katica: We work with companies who have made the gender equity public pledge. When getting started with Pipeline, the first step is identifying where they stand in their gender equity journey via the Pipeline Score. The second aspect is the Pipeline Forecast, which showcases how they’ll get to gender parity.

Katica: Pipeline helps customers understand the investment they need to make. The time to parity includes your starting point (16% women, or 60% women, etc.), your growth trajectory, and the speed of product adoption. You can utilize more recommendations to accelerate your time to parity.

Stefan: The app looks at contacts, leads and users in Salesforce to understand how leads and territories are assigned, how deals are close, how opportunities move through the funnel, etc. based on gender. This insight helps Pipeline seek out inequity and unconscious bias within the sales organization.

What has been an exciting moment as part of this journey?

Katica: On Equal Pay Day, which was recently on April 10th in the US, the Lieutenant Governor of Colorado kicked off the event with a proclamation from Governor Hickenlooper renaming it “Equity For All Day” in recognition of what Pipeline has done to close the gender equity gap. It was inspiring. Others spoke about gender equity and changing the narrative at the event, such as customers, and Ryan Harris, former NFL star and Super Bowl 50 champ (he protected Peyton Manning’s blind side). It truly is about equity for all.

What’s next for Pipeline?

Stefan: We’re continuing to build our algorithm. We’re excited to infuse more data sets into the platform and build out more functionality. We plan to grow the data set, the product and the company.

Katica: We started Voices for Equity™ on Facebook, and had Tony Prophet kick off our first Facebook Live broadcast. We want others to engage with us as well.

Check out Pipeline on AppExchange today to see where your organization stands in the journey to gender equity, and to boost your financial performance in the process. Be part of the conversation and let’s achieve gender equity in our lifetime.