Equilo is the brainchild of its founder, Jessica Menon, a gender specialist with more than 20 years of experience integrating gender equality into global development projects. Over time, Jessica realized she was having the same conversations with her colleagues about how inefficient gender analysis was and the problems that led to. Gender analysis was slow and time-consuming, and many people continued to see it simply as a check box activity that wasn't incorporated into decision-making on time to have a real impact. Jessica realized how many decision makers would benefit from having GESI analyses that were quicker, higher quality, and more impactful than the traditional manual method, which often took several weeks to get started and even longer to finalize.

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Jessica founded Equilo to replace old-fashioned research and project management with powerful online gender analysis tools to enable clearer, faster equality insight that translate into action. In 2020, Equilo launched its flagship GESI Contextual Analysis tool, which has continued to expand and now includes reliable, aggregated data for all countries in more than 50 sectors. Equilo continues to expand its suite of tools, which currently includes an in-depth GBV risk analysis tool, a suite of tools for impact investors to easily assess portfolio and pipeline companies across multiple gender equality dimensions, make plans to improve companies' gender equality, and measure and manage impact, and several open source tools including a resource directory and partner directory.