Pre-launch · A few excellent pilot partners wanted
Aurum

Most companies say they develop women. Almost none can show you who.

Aurum builds the record. Who was advanced, by whom, and what changed. Evidenced, dated, and impossible to invent.

See what the record looks like Or read the research

A record you could not fake if you wanted to.

Every claim an employer makes about developing women is an assertion. This is the only version that is evidenced by the people it happened to.

Sample data

  • Forty teams migrated, no downtime. Recorded March. Vouched for by the regional director.
  • Put forward for the platform lead role. Sponsor committed on 4 April. Followed through on 19 April.
  • Promoted, July. Nineteen months faster than the band average.
  • Sponsor follow-through across the cohort: 84 percent.

Three cycles of that and you are not making a claim about your culture. You are showing it.

The reason nobody has this.

Advancing someone costs a senior person something. They have to spend their own standing, in a room, on a specific name, at the moment a decision is made. Most organisations hope this happens. Very few can tell you whether it did.

She did the work. Who got the story?

She spends eight months on the migration.

Forty teams. No downtime. Nothing breaks.

Someone asks what she has been working on.

She says: I helped out with the migration.

She is not being modest. She cannot see it.

Nobody ever gave her the sentence.

The work is hers. The room should know it.

The research, because obviously

Change the speaker. Not the woman.

The pattern has been measured since 1998. The scoring rules change; the advice to women somehow does not.

The pattern is older than 1998: read the lineage

02 · The moving bar

The standard shifts when an assertive woman is evaluatedA man is assertiveA woman is assertiveJudged on competenceJudged on how she came acrossthe standard movesSource: Phelan, Moss-Racusin and Rudman, 2008
“Same work. Same words. A different person in her corner.”

We could give her another confidence workshop. Or we could change who carries the story into the room.

Goodwill is lovely. Deadlines are better.

The Ninety.

Four stages. Ninety days. Named commitments. One number at the end. Very little room for enthusiastic vagueness.

Aurum programme premise and methodology.

01 · Seen

Her work is documented as it happens. Outcomes, scope, numbers. A record, not a self-assessment.

02 · Said

She learns to describe it in a sentence another person can repeat accurately. This is the only part that is about her, and it is the part she keeps forever.

03 · Carried

A sponsor with real standing takes named commitments with dates. Who they will speak to, about what, by when.

04 · Counted

Retention, promotion velocity and cost avoided, measured against a matched control group.

Ninety days. Nothing to renew if the number disappoints.

Try the sentence test

Think of something you did at work this year.

Write it in one sentence, the way you would say it out loud.

This stays in your browser. We do not store it, see it or send it anywhere.

Or just read the argument.

The Ledger.

A CV asks her to make the case. The Ledger brings the evidence, the witnesses and the follow-through.

  • 01What she delivered, documented at the time rather than reconstructed at review season
  • 02Who vouched for her, by name, and what they committed to
  • 03What she was put forward for, and what happened
  • 04Verified, timestamped, and hers to take anywhere

We are not scoring women. There is nothing wrong with them. We are replacing an unverifiable claim with an evidenced record.

The

OBL

Only Brunches
and Lunches

The Only Brunches and Lunches Club.

The software tracks the promise. The club creates the relationship worth making one for. No awkward networking. No lanyards. No panel called “Finding Your Voice.”

Part A

Why the room is built this way

Opportunity travels along weak ties

The connections that move careers are usually not the close ones. A study of more than twenty million people found relatively weak ties drove job mobility more effectively than strong ones. The person who changes your career is rarely someone you already speak to every week.

Source: Rajkumar and colleagues, Science, 2022
Eating together changes how people cooperate

People who share a meal cooperate more and reach agreement faster than people negotiating with nothing on the table. Shared food is not a social nicety. It measurably changes the outcome.

Source: Woolley and Fishbach, research on shared meals and cooperation
Making something with your hands lowers the stakes of the conversation

Absorbing, repetitive work with the hands reduces stress and quiets self-monitoring. People who are occupied talk more freely than people being watched across a table. This is why our rooms have something in them to do.

Mechanism note: Established finding in occupational therapy and stress research

Side by side beats face to face

Direct conversation carries social pressure, particularly when you are being assessed. Shared activity removes the demand to perform, and people disclose considerably more. A panel discussion produces polite answers. A shared table produces real ones.

Mechanism note: Established finding in social psychology

Part B

What we actually do.

Pottery and ceramics

Hands occupied, eyes down, nobody performing. The most honest conversations we have had happened over a wheel.

Aurum format observation

Painting, loosely supervised

No talent required and none expected. The point is the absorption, not the painting.

Format mechanism: absorption

Herbal oil and scent blending

Scent binds to memory more directly than almost any other sense. People remember the room, and they remember who was in it.

Format mechanism: scent and memory

The long lunch

Curated tables, eight to ten people, deliberately mixed by seniority. No panel. No stage. No badges with job titles on them.

Aurum format design

Good table. Sharp women. Introductions with somewhere to go.

Promises are easy. Show the follow-through.

Every programme produces a retention number. Choose how deeply you want to understand what moved it.

Signal · Did it work?

  • Retention delta, sponsored cohort against matched control
  • Promotion velocity against your own historical baseline
  • Cost avoided, at your loaded replacement figure

Diagnostic · Where is it breaking?

  • Everything in Signal, plus:
  • Which rung women stall at, by function and by band
  • Which managers advance people and which quietly do not
  • Where in the ninety days a cycle tends to fail

Benchmark · How do we compare?

  • Everything in Diagnostic, plus:
  • Your sponsorship conversion against anonymised peer organisations
  • Sponsor effectiveness ranked across your leadership
  • Year on year movement, tracked across cycles

Benchmark requires data from enough organisations to be honest. We will tell you when it is ready rather than sell it before it is.

Aurum is an annual licence, sold to employers and priced against the cost of losing one mid-career manager, not per seat.

Sample data

Figures shown inside the Aurum product demo are illustrative, not Aurum customer results.

A polite warning

Not for box-tickers.

Aurum needs senior people willing to put their name to something and be measured on whether they followed through. In organisations where leadership will not commit in writing, or where this is being bought to satisfy a reporting requirement, the programme will produce a disappointing number and we will both have wasted a quarter.

We like a contract. We like an honest number more.

I watched the work. Then I watched who got chosen.

I worked in economic advisory and then ran a company's numbers as a CFO. Close enough to the rooms where people get chosen to notice who did the work, who described it, and which version travelled.

The pattern was remarkably consistent. A woman delivered something difficult. Someone else found the sentence for it. Guess which one the room remembered.

I wondered whether I was simply irritated. The research was more useful: this had been measured, the usual confidence advice missed the point, and the fix could be designed. So I built Aurum. Not another programme asking women to become more impressive. Infrastructure that makes impressive work harder to overlook.

Arundhati Babar, Founder

Be the employer with something to show.

Pre-launch. We are looking for a small number of pilot partners ready to build a record of who they advance.

Let’s talk about a pilot