These two women are pushing companies to become more gender equal

If Latin American businesses were doing anything at all to create more egalitarian workplaces, they were “doing [it] quietly,” says Mia Perdomo, who launched Aequales in 2014 with Andrea de la Piedra to promote gender equity in business. Although some regional divisions of international companies had been implementing overseas policies, most local companies “had never spoken about this out loud, and they had never compared themselves to other corporations to know if what they were doing was right,” says de la Piedra. The duo, who first met at a Georgetown University summit for young Latin American leaders, developed a signature ranking system to assess how companies are faring, which measures such factors as the percentage of women who join a company’s entry-level ranks, how many women are in top leadership roles, and whether a company forces its suppliers to be more gender equal. Aequales generates revenue from consulting fees and convening its community of Latin American leaders to learn from each other (and gives the highest-rated companies some reputational capital). After expanding from Peru and Colombia to Mexico (in 2018) and now all of Latin America, the company has analyzed more than 800 companies. Perdomo and de la Piedra are currently developing a tech platform that will allow firms to compare their progress with their peers and predict what impact such changes as flexible work policies might have on their business.