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Policy in Thailand restricting gender discriminating contents in education curricula

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Impact of climate change on unproductive labour such as collecting food and water, particularly for indigenous communities and low-income families in developing countries become more difficult

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Fully incorporate an intersectional approach (example: class, ethnicity, sexuality, abilities, and more) when promoting gender equality.

https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later

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As reflected by the during the COVID-19 pandemic, numerical and quota-based changes do not fully reflect the stability and the long term implementation results of gender equality progress.

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Climate policies and campaigns that particularly target individual changes in higher-income countries (recycling, plant-based meals, eco-friendly bags, conscious consumption for example) face barriers due to social norms that reinforce "inherent" gender-based characteristics (what is referred to as masculine vs feminine).

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The COVID-19 Global Gender Response Tracker monitors policy measures enacted by governments worldwide to tackle the COVID-19 crisis, and highlights responses that have integrated a gender lens. It includes national measures that are directly addressing women's economic and social security, including unpaid care work, the labour market and violence against women.

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Symbol of contemporary Latin American feminist movements and solidarity.

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As the world learns to live with COVID-19, to emerge from the current crisis, and to "build back better", UN Women's new "Feminist plan" provides a visionary but practical roadmap for putting gender equality, social justice, and sustainability at the centre of the recovery and transformation.

COVID-19 has revealed and worsened inequalities and is a reminder of just how unsustainable and fragile the world's economies and democracies are. The crisis also provides a warning about what is rapidly coming down the track on climate change and environmental degradation. This has created both a need and an opening to rethink economic and social policies and re-evaluate what needs to be prioritized.

The "Feminist plan" maps the ambitious and transformative policies-on livelihoods, care, and the environment-that are needed to build a more equal and sustainable future. To get there, it calls for context-specific policy pathways, tailored political strategies, and financing. The plan identifies key levers that can create change and the actors at global, national, and local levels that need to take action to move towards this vision.

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Beyond COVID-19: A feminist plan for sustainability and social justice

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The "Feminist plan" maps the ambitious and transformative policies-on livelihoods, care, and the environment-that are needed to build a more equal and sustainable future. To get there, it calls for context-specific policy pathways, tailored political strategies, and financing.

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As mentioned in the presentations, gender-based violence increased since the pandemic began. There is a strong link/relationship between unemployment (which rose as a result of COVID-19) and the perpetuation of gender-based violence.

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https://www.heforshe.org/en

HeForShe encourages not only women but also more men to participate in gender equality conversations and efforts.

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As the world marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, the HeForShe IMPACT report offers a timely reflection

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Fully incorporate an intersectional approach (example: class, ethnicity, sexuality, abilities, and more) when promoting gender equality.

https://www.law.columbia.edu/news/archive/kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality-more-two-decades-later

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Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later

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Professor Crenshaw coined the term and co-founded the African American Policy Forum. Before AAPF’s 20th anniversary, Crenshaw reflects on where intersectionality is heading.

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Women in informal sector leads to even unequal access to support and social safety net

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Women in informal sector leads to even unequal access to support and social safety net

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This article was originally published by Business and Industry

Kristin Hughes Director, Global Plastic Action Partnership, Member of the Executive Committee, World Economic Forum Geneva

An estimated 20 million people around the world work in the informal sector as waste pickers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been catastrophic for these essential workers, who lack basic social or health protections.

Waste pickers and informal workers need PPE, food, water and money for medications and supplies in the short term, and government support and recognition in the long term.

From Jakarta to Brooklyn, from Dakar to Rio de Janeiro, waste pickers have laboured tirelessly for decades to keep our streets clean and liveable - all without guaranteed pay, workplace protections or a social safety net.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the fallout was catastrophic.

An estimated 20 million people around the world work as waste pickers, collecting plastics, aluminium and other valuable materials that have been discarded in our streets and dumpsites and selling them to recycling facilities.

In South Africa, for instance, waste pickers contribute up to 90% of post-consumer packaging and paper that are recycled. And in Indonesia, 700,000 tonnes of plastic waste collected by informal workers are recycled every year.

Working with little societal or personal protection, informal sector waste pickers were already highly susceptible to health risks and occupational hazards. The COVID-19 crisis brought unprecedented new challenges: lockdowns, shuttered recycling plants, lack of personal protective equipment and inadequate government support, which have put millions around the world out of work and in harm's way.

As Pris Polly, chairman of Indonesia's 3.7-million strong waste pickers union, told us: "If waste pickers don't work, then they won't be able to survive."

How we can address this challenge

To weather this historic crisis, waste pickers urgently need short-term support: food, water, money for medications and other essentials, and protective supplies like masks and handwashing stations.

The NGO, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), which has long supported informal workers through research and advocacy, is tracking a global list of fundraisers created by local unions and organisations.

Our partner, Dow, has also co-launched a crowdsource fund in support of waste picker communities worldwide. Through its pilot partnership in São Paulo, Brazil's largest waste producer, Dow is bringing training, resources and equitable pay to hundreds of waste pickers and their families.

Challenges facing women waste pickers in Ghana

Dorcas Ansah, Accra Focal City Coordinator for the NGO Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), shared insights on the organisation's work with women waste pickers in Accra, Ghana.

In Accra, women fill the least secure roles in solid waste management and, like elsewhere in the world, they are first to be left behind as the sector formalises.

WIEGO works with Accra's waste pickers through the Kpone Landfill Waste Pickers Association, which advocates for a more inclusive waste management system in the region.

Women make up one-third of the landfill's more than 300 waste pickers, who remove almost 800 tonnes of recyclable material from the landfill annually. In 2019, this work prevented the emission of an estimated 24,371 tonnes of eCO2.

Despite their environmental contributions, the workers' livelihoods are under threat. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, waste pickers learned that the government is closing the Kpone landfill and they will not be allowed to return. The government started the process of decommissioning the landfill without having ensured viable livelihood alternatives or compensation for the waste pickers as they face displacement from the site.

The waste pickers are now working to find alternative livelihoods outside of the landfill. They are scoping coastal communities that need better waste management, and they have staged a pilot for doorstep waste collection. They hope this will help convince the government to give them contracts to be formally included in the sector.

Waste pickers and informal sector workers need government support

To protect their livelihoods in the long term, we must also advocate for governments and businesses to support informal sector workers in entering the formal workforce - where they can continue carrying out essential work with dignity, security and the reassurance that there is a safety net to fall back on during times of hardship.

This autumn, we will partner with SAP to launch a software solution to connect thousands of waste pickers with potential buyers and recyclers in Ghana and Indonesia. Our goal is to visualise and quantify the tremendous impact that waste pickers have in keeping cities clean - yielding concrete data that can be used to help waste pickers gain government recognition and formalisation.

The road back to "normal" will be difficult, particularly for the most vulnerable. Nevertheless, we hope that the pandemic and the subsequent recovery will shine a much-needed spotlight on this issue, serving as a catalyst for propelling millions of workers and their families out of the shadows.

This editorial was originally published as part of the Sustainable Packaging 2020 campaign, and is reproduced here with permission.

This article was originally published by Business and Industry.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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How to support waste pickers during the COVID-19 crisis

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Two years ago on International Women's Day (IWD), URBACT launched the Gender Equal Cities report to highlight what can be done at the local level to reduce gender-based inequalities. Last year, we published an article about the gendered impacts of Covid-19. This year, we want to mark IWD (8 March 2021) by starting to look forward and show how our understanding of Gender Equal Cities can usefully inform the Covid recovery in cities across Europe.

This article sets out a series of concrete suggested actions that cities can take to make sure the post-pandemic recovery puts the needs of women and girls at its heart, based on the lessons and knowledge developed by URBACT and its partners.

Gendered impacts of Covid-19

Before we look ahead, it is important that we remind ourselves of the gendered impacts of the current and ongoing crisis. Unfortunately, without knowing it, the observations we made last year were only at the start of the pandemic, which has exacerbated so many pre-existing social and systemic barriers to women's empowerment. Across the world, women are facing increased domestic violence, unpaid care duties, unemployment and poverty.

Job losses appear to be hitting traditionally female sectors - such as retail and service industries - harder than others; whilst part-time and flexible work - more often held by women - has been shown to be more precarious. On the other hand, male dominated sectors, such as construction and tech, have been less impacted and are likely to benefit from further stimulus in recovery funds.

Outside the world of work, the burden of additional caring responsibilities has been placed disproportionately on women, and the forced retreat of many women into the private sphere at home has undermined their ability to take part in civic and political life - as well as subjecting all too many to additional personal risks and distancing them from their support networks.

But there have also been positive signals in the past year. We have the 1st woman Vice President of the United States - a woman of colour creating a powerful role model for younger generations. Women scientists are leading vaccine and healthcare teams across the world, and several popular female leaders, like Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Sanna Marin in Finland, have received praise for their handling of the pandemic response. For women in many sectors, the mix of measures forced on us by the pandemic, such as remote and flexible working, could be maintained in ways that create enabling conditions to help us advance in the workplace.

It is in this context that UN Women made the theme for IWD 2021 'Women in leadership: Achieving an equal future in a Covid-19 world': "Women stand at the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis, as health care workers, caregivers, innovators, community organisers and as some of the most exemplary and effective national leaders in combating the pandemic. The crisis has highlighted both the centrality of their contributions and the disproportionate burdens that women carry."
Photo credit: Illustration: Alva Skog; Photo: Ryan Brown & Franck Chapolard & Alamy Stock Photo / UN Women
How cities can take action for a more equal recovery

The work of rebuilding our economies and our societies following the impact of Covid-19 must include acknowledging the gendered impacts of the crisis - along with the many pre-existing gender-based inequalities - and seeking appropriate means to address these in ways that benefit all of us.

Thankfully, work that URBACT undertook with its partners prior to the pandemic already gives us a lot of knowledge and even more inspiration from a gender equality perspective. As we look towards the recovery phase, we are able to make a series of specific recommendations that cities should undertake in order to put gender equality at the heart of building back better.

Actions for cities:

Appoint a 'recovery czar' at local level, whose remit has gender equality at its core.

Be conscious of who is at the table making policy and ensure balanced gender representation.

Invite gender experts and organisations representing women and girls to your local stakeholder group.

Make specific efforts to hear the voices and needs of the most marginalised and vulnerable women, being aware of the intersections with factors such as age, ethnicity, poverty and disability.

Push for percentage targets for women businesses and workers in bailouts and recovery funds, such as the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility.

Make sure gender budgeting principles are integrated to show how public recovery and other funds benefit women.

Develop targeted initiatives, such as training, access to finance, gender sensitive procurement to empower women to contribute to economic recovery. Studies show gender equality increases GDP and job creation.

Make sure local supply chains guarantee that women workers have access to decent work, social protection and equal opportunities.

Invest in social infrastructure such as childcare, mobility, health services, parks and cultural facilities that support families and enable women to participate on an equal footing in the labour market and public life.

Ensure financial safety nets are in place for those in most need, for instance in relation to food poverty and housing.

Focus on the education of girls and women and the development of their leadership skills.

Address the physical and mental health needs of women and girls emerging from lockdown.

Key principles underlining these recommendations are the importance of improving representation of women in decision-making and gender-disaggregated data for accelerating new, more equitable models of urban services in the recovery. These recommendations from URBACT also resonate in the work of our partner organisations.

"Women and girls' voices in all their diversity need to be heard, including in decision-making, now more than ever. We need sex-disaggregated data collection on the disease itself, economic impacts, care burden, incidents of sexual violence and abuse, and crisis recovery - and at all levels of governance." European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE)

The Vice-Chair of Standing Committee for Equality, Emil Broberg, has called for "specific measures to be taken and for recovery programmes to be allocated in a gender-balanced manner. Austerity policies in the past have proven harmful to women, for example in the cuts to public sector workers which impact women disproportionately. These problems must be dealt with at the local level."

Recommendations built on a wealth of URBACT knowledge

As stated above, these recommendations are based on the knowledge and inspiration of a number of activities by URBACT and its partner organisations over recent years, including the Gender Equal Cities report produced in collaboration with CEMR.

Cities have shown inspiring practices in the field of gender equality during the pandemic. For example, in Frankfurt (DE) - a signatory of the CEMR Charter for Equality of Women and Men in Local Life -- the Social Service departments agreed to provide additional emergency capacities at short notice for women facing violence at home during lockdowns and emergency places for women's shelters. They also developed a campaign to raise awareness of stereotypes and violence and insults women face in the street: "Cliche-free zone" www.klischeefreie-zone-ffm.de with posters created by young women.

The URBACT Gendered Landscape network continues to explore gender equality and gender mainstreaming as central to a more global understanding of how different structures connect and interact within urban policymaking and practice. In the past year, the network has delved into cross-cutting issues like mobility ( see articles) and intersectionality.

In the coming year, network cities will continue to pilot interesting gender actions. Trikala (EL) is planning a pop-up intervention in an urban space, and Barcelona Activa (ES) is opening a space dedicated to facilitating women entrepreneurship associations and organisations to meet and collaborate. As always, the results of these experiences will be shared with cities through URBACT channels.

Renewed efforts in 2021

In 2021, as the recovery gets underway, URBACT will re-launch its Gender Equal Cities workstream to build capacity and share knowledge about gender mainstreaming across our networks and beyond.

Our partners are also planning related efforts:

CEMR is celebrating the 15th anniversary of its 'European Charter for Equality of women and men in local life' in 2021 and will review its strengths/weaknesses to incorporate possible amendments (including related to Covid).

The European Institute for Gender Equality is currently conducting a study on gender-responsive public procurement and will launch a toolkit later in the year. This could potentially complement URBACT's existing knowledge and capacity building on public procurement.

So, on International Women's Day 2021, as we make a renewed commitment to Gender Equal Cities, we invite our networks and partners to share that pledge, to get in touch and to share your inspiring examples for an equitable recovery.
Cover photo credit: UN Women/Yihui Yuan

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Let's put gender equality at the heart of building back better

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Two years ago on International Women's Day (IWD), URBACT launched the Gender Equal Cities report to highlight what can be done at the local level to reduce gender-based inequalities. Last year, we published an article about the gendered impacts of Covid-19.

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More women forced into the private sphere - increased difficultly in tackling gender-based and domestic violence, disproportionately reduced women's social participation and economic autonomy

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“For every door that’s been opened to me, I’ve tried to open my door to others. And here is what I have to say, finally: Let’s invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about where you get yourself in the end. There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

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Tinker, tailor or transform: Gender equality amidst social-ecological change

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Tinker, tailor or transform: Gender equality amidst social-ecological change

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Global visions of environmental change consider gender equality to be a foundation of sustainable social-ecological systems. Similarly, social-ecological systems frameworks position gender equality as both a precursor to, and a product of, system sustainability. Yet, the degree to which gender equality is being advanced through social-ecological systems change is uncertain.

The authors use the case of small-scale fisheries in the Pacific Islands region to explore the proposition that different social-ecological narratives: (1) ecological, (2) social-ecological, and (3) social, shape the gender equality priorities, intentions and impacts of implementing organizations. They conducted interviews with regional and national fisheries experts (n = 71) and analyzed gender commitments made within policies (n = 29) that influence small-scale fisheries.

The authors developed a 'Tinker-Tailor-Transform' gender assessment typology. They find that implementing organizations aligned with the social-ecological and social narratives considered social (i.e., human-centric) goals to be equally or more important than ecological (i.e., eco-centric) goals. Yet in action, gender equality was pursued instrumentally to achieve ecological goals and/or shallow project performance targets.

These results highlight that although commitments to gender equality were common, when operationalized commitments become diluted and reoriented. Across all three narratives, organizations mostly 'Tinkered' with gender equality in impact, for example, including more women in spaces that otherwise tended to be dominated by men. Impacts predominately focused on the individual (i.e., changing women) rather than driving communal-to-societal level change.

The authors discuss three interrelated opportunities for organizations in applying the 'Tinker-Tailor-Transform' assessment typology, including its utility to assist organizations to orient toward intrinsic goals; challenge or reconfigure system attributes that perpetuate gender inequalities; and consciously interrogate discursive positions and beliefs to unsettle habituated policies, initiatives and theories of change.

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Tinker, tailor or transform: Gender equality amidst social-ecological change

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Global visions of environmental change consider gender equality to be a foundation of sustainable social-ecological systems. Similarly, social-ecological systems frameworks position gender equality as both a precursor to, and a product of, system sustainability. Yet, the degree to which gender equality is being advanced through social-ecological systems change is uncertain.

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https://www.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2020/04/policy-brief-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-women

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https://www.idea.int/data-tools/data/gender-quotas/database

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Increased work burden particularly for women performing unproductive labour.

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https://www.britishcouncil.org/society/womens-and-girls-empowerment/our-work/promoting-gender-equality-education-turkey

Promotion of gender equality in education funded by the EU and the Government of Turkey

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Overview

Funded by the European Union and the Government of Turkey, the project Promoting Gender Equality in Education is promoting gender equality for girls and boys throughout the education system by helping teachers, schools and the ministry of education to understand gender equality, assess their schools' capability and capacity to deliver on this and to ensure the curriculum and textbooks are free from gender bias.

It's not about being a man or a woman. It's all about being a human.

The project has been implemented in 40 pilot schools: 13 high schools, 14 secondary schools, 10 primary schools and three pre-schools.

It included developing tools to make the whole school gender-sensitive; developing recommendations to ensure gender equality by reviewing education policies, legislation, curricula and textbooks; training educators using specially-developed training packages and raising awareness about gender equality in different segments of society, starting from schools and their environs.

Impact

* The project has been implemented in 40 pilot schools in 10 provinces, reaching approximately 8,000 educators directly (and 60,000 indirectly) and 12,000 students and 1,000 parents.

* Gender Sensitive School Standards, a systematic and user-friendly tool that will help promote and mainstream gender equality throughout the education system, have been developed.

* Findings of an analysis of school curricula have been shared with the Ministry Of Education and will be taken into account during the development of textbooks and materials in the future.

* 542 female educators have been trained as part of the 'Leadership and Training for Female Teachers' programme, with more than 98% of participants stating that the training had made them aware of the attitudes that a teacher or school principal should adopt in a gender-sensitive school or environment.

* More than 22.9 million people were reached through social media.

External links

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Promoting Gender Equality in Education, Turkey

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Funded by the European Union and the Government of Turkey, the project Promoting Gender Equality in Education is promoting gender equality for girls and boys throughout the education system by helping teachers, schools and the ministry of education to understand gender equality, assess their schools' capability and capacity to deliver on this and to ensure the curriculum and textbooks are free from gender bias.

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https://www.womenwhocode.com/

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Women Who Code (WWCode) is an international nonprofit dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. Together, we are building a world where women are proportionally representative as technical leaders, executives, founders, VCs, board members and software engineers.