Shopping your values has become more popular than ever, and now it is easier to do so with the new Gender Fair mobile app. Gender Fair, an organization that that has analyzed more than 2,500 brands through a gender equity lens, has released a new app that will help consumers make purchasing decisions while shopping.

The Gender Fair app, which officially launches December 8 on Google Play and the Apple Store, allows shoppers to scan a product logo and receive a 100-point rating based on five key gender equity measures:

• Leadership and opportunity
• Employee policies
• Advertising and communications
• Diversity reporting
• Social responsibility

The ratings come from examining benchmark data from public sources. According to Sandra Phillips, Gender Fair’s Director of Strategic Expansion, “The five categories are intended to be holistic. What opportunities do you have for women now? What policies to you have in place? What’s your messaging?” Gender Fair looks at things like paid maternity and paternity leave, sexual harassment policies, percentages of women and women of color in leadership positions, the ways women and girls are portrayed in advertising, and reporting on diversity and support for programs focused on women and girls.

These metrics – and more – are analyzed to come up with the rating. To be considered Gender Fair, a company and its brands must score 70 points or higher. The ratings are based on data collected between April and September 2020 and are reassessed on a rolling basis. Approximately 16 percent of the brands currently analyzed have achieved the Gender Fair benchmark.

According to Phillips, the motive behind Gender Fair’s ratings and app is to translate day-to-day decisions, like what shampoo or cereal to buy, into larger shifts by companies to advance equality. Women make 85 percent of consumer shopping decisions, and the collective power of their purchasing behavior can send signals to companies to do more.

There is a neat intersection between Gender Fair and The WMarketplace. Both allow consumers shop their values, just at a different scale. In doing so, the two organizations help both small and large businesses learn about what they can do to advance gender equity within their company and in the community, as well as to close the economic gender gap. 

The Gender Fair app can yield some surprising results. Some corporations have in place robust gender policies and promote women to leadership positions, yet may not have as favorable metrics when it comes to other issues you may care about. But these decisions are ones that we need to make for ourselves as we balance what we know about a brand and our shopping choices. The Gender Fair app gives us one additional point of information as we strive to shop our values.