Women worldwide, especially in low-income countries, face many barriers to entrepreneurship, including limited access to capital, harassment, and violence. It’s easy to assume that online services and opportunities lessen these barriers—that women can freely network, sell, borrow, and skill up to make their ventures a success without the biases they face in the physical world. Yet research shows that digital platforms in and of themselves don’t create equal playing fields. Taking on a digital marketing gig, for example, requires upfront capital for a laptop, reliable Internet access, professional software, and access to data—capital that is harder for them to get. The World Bank estimates that the total micro, small, or medium enterprise finance gap for women is $1.7 trillion.

Successes like Bumble Bizz, a networking app that lessens harassment by having women be the first to initiate any male-female connection, and CARE’s Village Savings and Loan Associations, a credit program specifically for women entrepreneurs, might lead us to think that we can make a product work for female entrepreneurs only if we rebuild it entirely to their needs. However, while creating equitable online environments demands research and effort, it doesn’t necessarily require the reinvention of existing products and platforms. Any organization looking to break down barriers for women entrepreneurs online and become more gender inclusive can take steps to do so without fundamentally changing their product.

Organizations large and small can take steps to make their products and platforms more equitable. Here are six things we did to move the dial.

  1. Find out what women value and what is holding them back.
  2. Run a brand audit to discover what unintended signals you are sending.
  3. Work gender inclusivity into every aspect of the design process.
  4. Run experiments to determine the right thing to do.
  5. Design human resource policies that address the needs of women.
  6. Make gender targets a regular component of your overall targets.

Read the full article about women social entrepreneurs by Anne Miltenburg at Stanford Social Innovation Review.