How Gender Smart Business Practices Led to this Latin American EdTech’s Workforce Transformation

About

uPlanner is a Chilean edtech company offering innovative technological solutions that leverage artificial intelligence and big data to help public and private higher education institutions in Latin America optimise their internal processes and resources, to increase coverage, improve students’ educational experience, and reduce dropout rates. More broadly, uPlanner supports the transition of universities to online delivery, by providing them with the tools needed to improve their process and optimise their resources while ensuring a high quality student educational experience.

As of late 2023, the company has over 100 employees helping to deliver uPlanner's unique educational planning, retention, and other learning management solutions to over 80 higher education institutions, reaching over 1.5 million students currently in Colombia, Peru, Chile, and across Latin America.

Type of actor
Investment fund (ALIVE Ventures) and investee (uPlanner)

Investment type
Equity

Operates from
uPlanner was founded in Chile, but has operations across Latam, including Colombia, Peru, Mexico and others.

Sectors
Education/Edtech

Approach

During due diligence, ALIVE dove into certain focus areas to ascertain the level of commitment to gender equality and to working with ALIVE during the life of the investment to adopt gender-smart business practices. Types of questions and topics explored include:

• Does the company incorporate a gender perspective into its business strategy, and if so, how? 

• Does the company perceive gender as a business opportunity? If so, in what ways? If not, why?

• Has the company implemented any gender specific initiatives in the past?

These deeper dives into the gender approach of the company enabled ALIVE to understand not just previous efforts, the current state of gender-smart business operations, and the executive team’s commitment to gender, but also helped to establish a baseline for what future gender-focused technical assistance could focus on during the life of the investment.

In 2021, ALIVE invested in uPlanner, seeing the strong interest from their management team to improve gender outcomes. This investment was complemented by a gender-focused Technical Assistance Facility.

In partnership with Value for Women, an initial assessment of the company revealed that there was an opportunity to formalise a gender commitment with policies and practices. There was also room for improvement in the gender balance of leadership positions and in operations. The company defined and focused on two strategies: 

• Strategy 1: Adopting gender best practices for recruitment

• Strategy 2: Implementing a gender lens in employee satisfaction, retention, and career development.

Some of the activities carried out under Strategy 1 included:

• Reviewing the recruitment process to understand women’s participation at each stage

• Identifying and using dissemination channels to reach more women in technology.

• Establishing goals in terms of gender composition in the different departments and levels.

• Performing a gender-disaggregated analysis of human resources metrics.

• Developing a guide for the use of gender inclusive language.

Some of the activities implemented under Strategy 2 were:

• Conducting a survey with staff to gather feedback on the practices and benefits that uPlanner provides currently and could provide in the future to promote work-life balance, professional development and well-being in general.

• Including questions to periodically measure equity and inclusion indicators in subsequent employee surveys.

• Some of the employee benefits were adjusted to better respond to the different needs of women and men

• A gender and diversity and inclusion workshop was conducted with employees in leadership positions.

Key Partner

To implement the long-term gender-focused technical assistance project, ALIVE partnered with the gender experts at Value For Women. Value for Women worked closely with uPlanner over 6-8 months, providing resources, analysing uPlanner’s current practices, and guiding implementation of related initiatives. 

Impact

As a result of the gender-focused technical assistance project, from 2022 to 2023 uPlanner saw the following results:

• The revamping of its employee benefits package to better respond to the needs of women helped to reduce turnover of women employees from 49% to 4%. 

• Thanks in part to the gender lens assessment of the recruitment process and hiring policy, use of dissemination channels to reach more women candidates, and adoption of gender inclusive language in job postings, the following results were achieved between 2022 and 2023:

  • 65% of all new hires were female. 

  • Women’s representation in the overall workforce increased from  25% to 38%. 

  • Women’s representation in Operations increased from 17% to 26%.

  • Women representation in Leadership increased from 21% to 25%.

  • Representation of women on its Board of Directors increased from 0 to 40%.

Key Takeaways

The success of this project was based on a variety of factors, but two stand out as particularly relevant learnings: 

• Support from Leadership is key:

Acceptance and endorsement of the work by the company’s leadership and, in particular, the CEO, enabled the gender committee to make rapid progress in establishing priorities and objectives, and in implementing actions focused on talent and culture.

• Aligning gender strategies with current business strategies:

uPlanner implemented an inclusive recruitment strategy in parallel with its ongoing recruitment strategy, which was essential for the expansion of the company; this contributed to immediate results in improving gender diversity at the company.

“The gender inclusion project with ALIVE and Value for Women not only helped us establish metrics and a plan to reach our organisational gender objectives, but also lay the foundation to work on comprehensive equity initiatives involving gender, culture, age, and more.”
Andrea Lorenzini
People and Culture Manager, uPlanner

What’s next?

The project not only helped transform uPlanner’s workforce gender balance, it helped instil a culture of gender inclusion, increased internal capacity to continue implementing new initiatives, and established a solid foundation for strengthening its other emerging Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion strategies. ALIVE will continue supporting the company by providing gender-focused assistance and periodically track the gender metrics at the company, in addition to the initiatives implemented by the gender committee.

Considering the team’s capacity now to implement and monitor gender practices, ALIVE is confident that in the long term, uPlanner’s progress will have a significant positive impact on the company’s bottom line, given the strong positive correlation between greater profits and factors such as reduced turnover and greater workforce gender balance. This can further build the business case for gender-smart business practices.