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Advancing Gender Equality in the Workplace Conference
On May 14, 2024, USAID’s Engendering Industries program held its Advancing Gender Equality in the Workplace Conference. The event convened program partners, implementers, thought leaders, and donors from around the world to discuss practical and effective methods for advancing workplace gender equality.
The Program
“Through the intentional approach we took we now have more women who are getting promoted and hired into leadership positions. And all these activities had a big impact on the culture.”
Our Critical Role
Rachel Vogelstein, Special Assistant to the President and Deputy Director of the White House Policy Council, acknowledged the critical role Engendering Industries plays in supporting the Biden-Harris administration to advance women's economic participation around the world. Ms. Vogelstein recognized Engendering Industries’ contributions as a flagship program under the United States Women in the Sustainable Economies (WISE) initiative, which supports women’s access to high-quality, well-paying jobs in the lucrative blue and green sectors.
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Our Approach
The program shared its evidence-based approach, which has supported 47 longer-term partners to hire and promote nearly 13,000 women since 2017. Engendering Industries’ approach consists of six pillars: collecting and using data, building a business case for gender equality, coaching partners to use best practices for advancing gender equality across the employee lifecycle, training employees to become change agents, and engaging men.
“We hired more women in the technical positions and management has started to appreciate how much better performing our technical unit is than before… [This effort] is not about getting all women in the unit, but it's really getting the management to understand that women can do what men can and that we can perform better even better.”
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Advancing Women in the Workplace
Eight senior leaders from partner companies in the Dominican Republic, India, Jordan, Kenya, Kosovo, Mozambique, the Philippines, and South Africa, shared their experiences, lessons learned, and the impacts of implementing the Engendering Industries approach at their companies. Over the course of two panel discussions, partners reflected on effective methods for advancing women in the workplace and the role of leaders in advancing gender equality. Partners also shared the positive business benefits of increasing gender equality at their companies.
Panel Discussion Replays:
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“A few years ago, at BRPL, there were some high loss areas in our area of distribution with commercial losses were to tune of 80%.. and it was really difficult to get a breakthrough…So our organization thought of a different strategy - an all-women team… Having this pilot run for a few months, we got around 200 new connections. Our leadership sat up and took a look, ‘Okay, women can also work in challenging functions.’ … This acted on the bottom line of the company. So, this is something this created a business case for us.”
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Empowering Women
Engendering Industries change management coaches gave talks on the business case for gender equality, the importance of engaging men, and methods for increasing gender equality and women’s empowerment. Coaches shared their experiences collaborating with partners to implement gender equality initiatives at each phase of the employee lifecycle, and their methods for guiding partners to overcome difficult barriers to gender equality.
Watch the Replays:
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Exploring Technical Themes
Finally, conference attendees participated in technical breakout sessions on the topics of the business case, using data to advance gender equality, survivor-centered approaches to workplace gender-based violence, and engaging men. Partners presented case studies from their companies on these technical themes, and participants shared their experiences in these technical areas.
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