Rising Tide Partners with Organizations that Connect Women Entrepreneurs to Mentoring, Capital, and Other Tools that Help Advance their Businesses and Make Significant Contributions to Our Global Economy

By Brent MacDonald – Partner at Rising Tide

iSAW aims to achieve a 10x acceleration in reaching workplace gender equality worldwide through its service offerings enabled by a powerful digital platform – iSAW LIFT

In order to attain gender equality globally, according to the World Economic Forum's (WEF) Global Gender Gap Report 2022, it will take an average of 132 years. This figure combines four distinct measures of the status of gender equality, with the most extreme measure—economic women's participation—estimating it will take 151 years (the average number worldwide) to attain equality. As a result, the 132 years will not move forward quickly unless the business community speeds up the achievement of gender equality in the workplace, which is the main problem to which this blog aims to offer answers.

Rising Tide and iSAW, the International Strategic Accelerator for Women, are partners. The unique value proposition of iSAW is that it is a forward-thinking organization that offers a variety of integrated services for corporate executives who want to accelerate and preserve gender equality for better business outcomes as well as for individual women and their allies. The “iSAW LIFT” digital platform enhances and sustains the enterprises' acceleration through a holistic set of advisory services and information to empower women in the workplace.

The iSAW LIFT platform also aims to unlock the power of this collective community to remove the workplace barriers that are holding women and global economies back; it does this through providing members with summaries of crucial data and insights that are typically buried in lengthy reports, fostering a values-based culture of constant striving to learn, lead, and uplift others, and establishing both online and offline communities showcasing the world's top thinkers from iSAW. iSAW is a social impact organization headquartered in the US and UK, with activities in over 10 countries and expanding worldwide. iSAW has worked with 15 Universities and over 1000+ students to support its efforts and create content for its GRID – Gender Research Insights Database, which has aspirations to be the largest summarized and classified data set on gender economic equality worldwide

For the success of iSAW's purpose and the growth of gender equality in the workplace, male supporters are recognized, appreciated, and necessary. iSAW MEN are male champions and are key to the progress of women to ensure they have opportunities to advance and thrive – they are also part of a community who desire to be fluent in the language of gender equality, able to continuously learn and talk about gender issues and create change to ensure a working environment where women can thrive.

Rising Tide Works to Balance the Genders in the Venture Capital Ecosystem

In collaboration with the US Embassy and Consulates in Saudi Arabia, iSAW recently held 3 events for women in the Kingdom in observance of International Women's Day, Women’s Entrepreneurial week, and Women's History Month. While some activities were exclusively for women, others featured male allies and champions. These events were significant and deeply meaningful. Rising Tide Partner Brent MacDonald participated in the workshop titled “Entrepreneurship, Funding, and Pitching for Business”. Co-Presenter Lori Munoz, Chief Financial Officer at Exo, a pioneering medical imaging software and devices company and Rising Tide portfolio company, highlighted her experiences as an entrepreneur. Lori has been recognized with a Bronze Stevie Award in the Healthcare category of the 2022 Stevie Awards for Women in Business, more here.

The total investment made by Rising Tide into women-founded or co-founded venture-backed enterprises spans years and is significantly higher than the US and global average for the venture capital industry. Rising Tide's female founders and/or CEOs include people like Alex Wright, co-founder of Ayar Labs, Manisha Shah-Bugaj, CEO of Activ Surgical, Mariam Maghribi, president and CEO of Atia Vision, and Maha Achour, founder and CEO of Metawave. Tianyue Yu, Co-Founder & CDO of Quanergy, Etosha Cave, Co-Founder & CSO of Twelve, Julia Rasoolu, Founder and CEO of Puracath Medical. We at Rising Tide have the utmost respect for these ladies since they are lighting the way for female entrepreneurs all around the world!

Most Gender Equality activities are focused on senior or high-potential women in the organization and often take the form of structured learning and development courses, supported by individual-driven research, mostly on the Internet. The vast majority of women in the workplace are not given access to relevant, easily consumable knowledge that will raise their effectiveness in the workplace and empower them to lead and lift others on the learning journey. The goal of iSAW is to represent the interests of women at all levels of an organization and to support businesses that are significantly improving the status of women at work, thereby helping to close the gender equality gap on a global scale.

This mission statement is one with which Rising Tide completely concurs.