Women’s Equality Day, a day that reminds 26th August 1920, when votes for women officially became a part of the US constitution. This day celebrates women’s achievements that ended the struggle for equal treatment of women and their rights.
Every year, the president reads aloud a proclamation, spotlighting an exceptional work accomplished by trailblazers in this movement.
In 2016, President Barack Obama said,
Today, as we celebrate the anniversary of this hard-won achievement and pay tribute to the trailblazers and suffragists who moved us closer to a more just and prosperous future, we resolve to protect this constitutional right and pledge to continue fighting for equality for women and girls.
So, on 26th Aug, we would like to enhance the shine of this day by narrating some success stories behind unique ventures by “Powerful Women.”
1. Meet Sara Gifford, COO & Co-founder of ActiVote
One of the founders of ActiVote is ‘women’; yes, she’s Sara Gifford. After profound research, we comprehended that Sara has been passionate about technology and empowering voters since the start.
I have heart. I am relentless. I am dedicated. I take all of those values and apply them to life and to our work increasing voter participation, because it takes all of those things to maintain our democracy.
Sara Gifford
Throughout her career, she made the best use of technology to enhance systems and processes. She started with an aim to offer the voters access to elections and candidates’ information, besides boosting civic engagement.
ActiVote: Voting & Politics
A safe environment for voter research, ActiVote is acknowledged as an outstanding tool that presumes out of voting and permits everyone to participate in voting/elections at the state, local, and federal levels. The users can witness all the upcoming elections and the candidates, participate in polls and share their beliefs.
2. Meet Meggie Palmer, CEO & Founder of PepTalkHer
Again you will be surprised to know that the founder of PepTalkHer is a woman whose mission is to put the curtain of “gender pay and leadership pay” down. She’s Meggie Palmer.
Maggie founded PepTalkHer after being a victim of inequality while working as a journalist.
I wanted to have all of my customers’ information in one place, because I knew that they were key to our growth,
Palmer said.
An entrepreneur friend told her about customer relationship management (CRM) tools and how glad she was that her own business had started using Salesforce.
Her company has grown into a multimillion-dollar endeavor, and CRM made that process a lot easier,
Palmer said.
She serves on various boards and is a passionate angel investor also. She focuses on tech businesses.
PepTalkHer – Get a Promotion & Pay Raise
PepTalkHer assists aspirational, professional, and career women meet success in their personal and work lives. It facilitates journaling daily career success to make women remember that, yes, they are fantastic. Contributing to the same, this app alerts the users to enter their weekly successes and upload their images or notes to remind them about their victories.
Besides, PepTalkHer emails your achievements as a word doc to let you flaunt your wins and get a pay raise or promotion conversation.
3. Jo Aggarwal, Founder and CEO of Wysa
Jo Aggarwal is the founder of this fantastic AI friend with which you can chat for free. She appraises herself as a problem solver. After investing her six years in the Middle East, attempting hard to assist young people to grow after a dispute with her husband, she realized that money or strong support is not the fundamentals of emerging with something unique.
We sort of really came into our own when Covid started. Post Covid, the business-to-business side, which is where we always thought we would make our money (we never intended to significantly monetise consumers directly, that was more social impact), has just taken off.
Jo Aggarwal
In 2015, she rolled out ‘StayClose,’ a startup with a target to help people fight loneliness. But, her venture got shut down within a year. This made her push toward depression. But, this time played an important role in thriving her second thought, Wysa.
Wysa was launched in 2016 on World Mental Health Day. It’s an emotionally sensitive AI bot that has already saved various lives and is picked by millions of people in over 30 countries worldwide.
Wysa – Emotionally Sensitive AI Bot – Anxiety, Therapy Chatbot
Wysa, a well-being tracker, is packed with routine spiritual meditation that helps improve mental health. Besides, it helps stay emotionally healthy by mood tracking, reframing thoughts in friendly chats to reduce sadness, and finding optimism.
Wysa crafts users’ personalized toolkits, including the tools to calm anxiety, cope with depression, support grief, and resolve sleep issues.
To get through a tough phase, during which one experiences a mix of emotions, we have to talk about it. But the thought of sharing something like that with others can appear daunting. The need to talk was always very clear to me. To deal with my own depression, I figured chatbots works well.
Jo Aggarwal
4. Lamia Pardo, CEO and Co-Founder of Journify
Living in a busy city and being a millennial, Lamia and her friends were well aware of the significance of mental wellness. But, most of them failed to pick a dedicated time for their mental health maintenance. They knew that meditation is one of the various ways to boost mental health, but it demands expert guidance and devoted time.
Lamia came forward and began her research on the tools available for mental wellness maintenance and emerged with some goal-setting apps that were not easy to use, and some mental health apps were aimed toward mental health illness. She was expecting more from this technology to help people catch up with better mental health without picking dedicated time. This way, she came up with the idea of rooting an audio journaling app that millennials can use easily to track their feelings and thoughts in less time.
When I started researching the space in early 2019, I noticed a big opportunity for a go-to app for mental wellness on the go. Now with COVID-19, I believe this opportunity has grown faster. We spoke to over 100 millennials to design the app but also got really important inspiration from in-depth conversations with therapists and coaches.
Lamia Pardo
Journify – Protect Your Mental Health – Audio Journal, Voice Diary
Journify, an audio journal, helps you speak your mind, protecting your brain’s health and improving productivity. The users can tap anytime to record and save their clips with notes and tags, assisting them in remembering the most crucial moments.
When a user is online, Journify automatically transcribes users’ journal entries for easy sharing and reference. Users can build an audio timeline of their lives and/or record their memories and thoughts on the go. So, those curious about their emotions and mood swings over time can turn on the Mood Analyzer.
5. Meet Mengting Gao & Verena Hubertz of Kitchen Stories
Met while studying at business school, WHU, Mengting Gao, and Verena Hubertz launched Kitchen Stories in early 2014.
They started with an aim to help people cook using their user-friendly app, including all the required features and cooking information.
Verena Hubertz told a news website,
We believe the ideal cooking app still isn’t available on the market.
She added,
We aim to solve this by creating the most user-friendly app with all the features and information our users need to cook – regardless whether they’re an absolute beginner or already a hobby chef. Our motto is ‘anyone can cook’ and we want to take away the kitchen anxiety.
Kitchen Stories – Cook Tasty Food – Easy Recipes
All over the world, millions of users are already using Kitchen Stories to learn to cook tasty food recipes. This app is the winner of the Design Award of Google Play. This cooking app arrives with various HD cooking and baking instructional videos and articles. Besides, the users can publish their tasty food recipes to share with the global community of hungry home cooks.
6. Julia Sutton, Founder and Advisor of Exhale
Julia and her husband have three children; one is twelve, the other is ten and eight. So, balancing her career as a yoga instructor, her family responsibilities, and her travel schedule was never easy.
Once, she said,
I’ve learned that in order to be a successful leader, you must develop strong people under you that you can rely on. This not only includes those I work with but my babysitters as well.
She started as a personal trainer, and in college, she worked at the front desk of a health club.
The biggest influence on Julia’s life was always her grandmother, Julia Griffin Earls.
Julia’s words about her grandmother,
She displayed great courage coming here from Ireland at a young age. A born healer, she worked at Lord & Taylor as an esthetician. She loved to help others with their outer beauty so that they could shine from the inside out.
In her entire career, Sutton had penetrated the spa/fitness industry, directing about ten spas across the country and being a national spa operations manager for Wellbeings, one of the widely-expanded health club chains in the nation before she created exhale.
Her company at 18 locations has over 1000+ employees throughout.
When asked how she crafts a team mentality, she said,
By living it. Most of my unit managers will tell you that they see me vacuuming or steam cleaning the carpets myself.”
Gratitude goes a long way. This creates great energy for the remainder of the meeting,” she declares.
Exhale – Perfect Well-Being Experience – BIWOC Well-Being, Meditation
An exceptional blend of spa and fitness, exhale is the whole well-being experience that can help you center your mind and body.
Whether you want an hour of calm or let your body conduct a sweat session, exhale provides a perfect menu to enable you to rejuvenate, recenter, and reconnect with your best. You can elevate your well-being under the guidance of experts and spa therapists at Exhale.
7. Amy Cross, Founder of Gender Fair
Let’s read her revert in her words when asked about the reason behind adopting a market-based strategy to obtain equality.
We’ve been talking about the problems for a long time. I’ve been an ethical shopper for decades and I buy Fair Trade, but I wondered why there wasn’t something like that for me. It made me feel like I don’t matter. I don’t matter? It feels terrible to not matter. The thing is, no one gives you power. You either have it, or you take it. And women have power! We have huge economic power. If we want to solve these problems I’ve been talking about my whole life, why not use our power? Using our market power might change our lives. And we know it works, there are already many great examples of what women consumers have done. There’s no reason why women can’t do this to push the needle forward. We’ve stagnated on women’s leadership in corporate America. We have got to keep our eye on the ball.
This brand aims to ease every woman, ensuring that every dollar they spend goes to a brand that serves women pretty well. It will let them help the cause of “women’s equality.”
Gender Fair – Make a Real Difference for Women
Gender Fair lets the users know which brands and companies support women, so they, especially females, can spend on something good. Some of your preferred brands may not be running under female leadership, broadcast some offensive commercials, or may not approve maternity leave.
Here, Gender Fair arrives with hard-to-find data on 600+ companies, each rate on 100 points.
8. Robyn Exton, Founder of HER Lesbian, Bi & Queer Dating App
An app that will let you chat and meet queer women, nonbinary, trans, and gender non-conforming people.
HER is developed by queers for queers. They proudly offer a safe chat and dating space for the LGBTQIA2S+ community to build meaningful relationships, hand out, and hook up.
‘HER’ was launched in 2013 that help lesbians find their dates.
The current CEO of Her, Robyn Exton, has made this app the world’s largest platform for queer females, with 4+ million users in 50+ countries.
A year before the launch of the HER app, Exton was working in London in the marketing field. Being fed up with the poorly crafted and untrustworthy dating websites aimed at lesbians, she emerged with the decision to create something better.
She says,
Lesbians exist. It’s a box of forms. Why has no one made an app for us?
She worked harder to root this app independently by learning to code, taking web development classes, networking events, and more. Her savings blew off in crafting his idea.
After launching Her app, she quit her job to work dedicated to her app.
I could be mopping the floors on Saturday, pitching investors on Tuesday. I do whatever needs to be done to keep this company going.
Robyn Exton
9. Liat Mordechay Hertanu, Co-Founder & CMO of 24me
A passionate entrepreneur, Liat always looks for ways to make her life easier and better. As a co-founder of 24me, Liat is on her mission to transform how people manage their routine life and save precious time for other essential spaces.
Along with her team, Liat founded 24me to assist millions of people worldwide to improve their life quality.
Besides, she’s chiefly involved with the startup community and offers lectures and mentoring sessions to initial-stage startups and entrepreneurs. She provides professional sessions about work-life balance and time management worldwide.
When asked “how and why she started 24me?” she said,
24me was born out of a real-life challenge — to be more organized with the little time we have. Like many young parents, we found ourselves overwhelmed by daily life management, juggling between work, household, errands and the kids.
We looked for solutions that would help us keep on top of things, but nothing really worked. We were looking for a solution that will bring everything together: our calendars, tasks, notes and personal reminders. Back then, we couldn’t find such a solution, so we decided to build it ourselves: a smart personal assistant for busy individuals.
24Me – Manage your Routine Life Better -Calendar, To Do List, Notes & Reminders
An award-winning personal assistant app, 24me assists millions of people worldwide in boosting their productivity. It is an easy-to-use and robust app that keeps everything in one place relevant to your schedule, like your to-do list, calendar, notes, and more. This way, it saves the users’ time for the other essential jobs in their lives.
Besides, 24me automatically generates personalized reminders, auto-completes the tasks, and organizes the schedules. Moreover, it permits users to customize and sync aspects with their devices.
10. Marah Lidey & Naomi Hirabayashi of Shine
Naomi Hirabayashi and Marah Lidey, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of Shine, worked together for 7+ years before launching their product.
If we don’t take care of ourselves, speak our needs, prioritize our boundaries and just take a few moments to check in with our feelings—we ultimately won’t be able to reach our goals, and we can’t be there to support others.
Marah Lidey
Earlier, they were CMO and Director of Mobile Product at one of the largest NGOs in the country. They build expertise in leading an organization from zero to 5 million, independently managing together.
Their friends usually said to them, “You’re so lucky to have each other.” When they both asked about the support of their routine wellbeing, they replied, “Ambitious millennial women like us didn’t have a go-to support for their wellbeing.”
I’m striving more for feelings of fulfillment. And part of that includes recognizing that often the sum of our life is made up of a lot of small, meaningful, everyday moments— versus huge, momentous, next-level feelings of joy.
Naomi Hirabayashi
So, they both emerged to scale the peer-based support they gave each other and announced their first product, Shine which eases the users to practice self-compassion.
Shine – A Well-Being App – Calm Anxiety & Stress
A mental wellness app, Shine, is best for better mornings and radiant days and picks the truest out of you. This app helps you start your mental wellness venture with its premium plan. It includes daily meditations, self-care courses, and personalized support. The users can listen to new meditations related to their world daily.
Wrapping Up
So, after reading the inspirational stories behind the success of big ventures running under Women Leadership, we can say, “we should clutch our power.”
Most of these leaders didn’t even belong to any entrepreneurial background; they learned from their experience. “Trust Yourself” is something that’s essential in this world to surface something unique.
Now, would like to wrap up with wonderful lines about women-
A woman may not be wiser, better, more intelligent, wiser, more responsible, or more creative than a man; still, "she's a human." If a man is better, a WOMAN IS ALSO NEVER LESS!
“EQUALITY” is the RIGHT of women!
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