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Integrating Gender into Workplace Policies
Human resource policies are fundamental for establishing an organization’s workplace culture and fostering each employee’s work experience and career progression. Gender, social inclusion, and diversity policies are important organizational building blocks that create an enabling environment for equality, enable organizations to set and track progress toward goals, and support organizations to develop a business case for gender equality.
When effective, inclusive policies set the tone of an organization, demonstrate leadership commitment, and enable organizations to achieve gender equality in practice. While creating a gender equality policy is an important step toward gender equality in practice, it should be noted that all HR policies must be created and reviewed with a gender lens to ensure gender is integrated across the organization.
Successful HR policies that fully support gender equality and diversity goals help promote gender equality and inclusion throughout all stages of the employee life cycle. By ensuring each policy prioritizes gender equality and diversity with clear measures and targets, levels of accountability, and action plans to implement the policy and monitor progress, you can ensure women and others with diverse social identities thrive in your organization. Fully adopting gender-equitable and inclusive policies throughout the employee life cycle will also help you align with your company’s business case.
Tips for Policy Implementation
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Secure Early Buy-In at All Levels and Ensure Diverse Voices are Involved in Drafting the Policy
To build a more inclusive workforce, diverse voices must be involved in drafting policies. HR policies should be created with input from people in multiple departments at various levels, ensuring that women and decision makers with diverse social identities are included. The policy should have buy-in at all levels, especially senior leadership to ensure there is commitment to implement the policy and adopt it at the board level.
Ensure Strong and Ongoing Dissemination and Socialization
Once the policy is in place, there must be a strong and ongoing dissemination and socialization plan to explain why the policy is needed and how it will benefit all staff as well as the organization as a whole. Staff will need to be trained on the policy and related topics (i.e., unconscious bias), particularly managers and senior leaders who are responsible for modeling and enforcing policies. The communications and HR departments play an important role in sharing success stories to help staff understand and support the policies, introducing policies in the onboarding process, and ensuring all staff can easily access and review the policies. An organization can survey employees to assess understanding of the policies and whether they are being followed or used appropriately.
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Create Accountability
Lasting improvements will be made if there is an enabling environment for accountability and follow-through. There must be an action plan with clear and measurable time-bound targets to support the implementation of the policy. A specific department should be responsible for implementing the policy, monitoring progress toward actionable targets with sex-disaggregated data, and reviewing the policy on a periodic basis to assess if changes are needed. There should also be key performance indicators for managers’ successful implementation of the policy to ensure senior leadership is accountable.
Best Practices for Integrating Gender into Workplace Policies
Use our Best Practices Framework tool to learn how to integrate gender into workplace policies.
Engendering Industries Workplace Policies Resources
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This guide supports companies, organizations, and government agencies to create and implement policies that improve gender equality in the workplace.
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The Best Practices Framework provides a series of actions companies should take at each phase of the employee lifecycle to sustainably advance gender equality across their workforce.
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This case study shares lessons from Engendering Industries’ partner, Eko Electricity Distribution Company, in Nigeria.
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This case study features BSES Rajdhani Power Limited (BRPL) who improved parental leave for all employees, boosting performance at the utility.
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