ISEAL’s new toolkit looks to advance gender equality, tackling gender-based issues within standards and beyond.
Thirty years on from the UN Beijing Declaration, which sought to ‘advance the goals of equality, development and peace for all women everywhere,’ we need to do more to transform women’s lives.
Gender inequality remains a prominent issue within global value chains, with exploitation, lack of opportunity and gender pay gaps amongst its most widespread consequences.
ISEAL supports credible and effective sustainability systems to advance their efforts on gender equality and social inclusion.
The newly published Advancing gender equality through sustainability systems: Toolkit and good practices outlines the importance of prioritising gender rights. In partnership with the CGIAR Initiative on Gender Equality, the toolkit provides a holistic approach to gender-based challenges.
The toolkit details how sustainability systems can work towards mainstreaming gender equality at three levels: within their own organisations, through their standards and in their programmatic activities.
It also covers the need for robust and reliable data and metrics that should underpin any efforts on gender equality.
Gender equality within standards and programmatic work
Sustainability systems can implement gender equality requirements into their standards and their own internal organisation. At a minimum, they must ensure their standards prevent harm, including the prevention of harassment and equal treatment under the law.
Their role is to set and maintain the highest of standards when dealing with gender equality. UN Women state, ‘Achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment is integral to each of the 17 (Sustainable Development) goals.
‘Only by ensuring the rights of women and girls across all the goals, will we get to justice and inclusion, economies that work for all, and sustaining our shared environment now and for future generations.’
In the practical context of sustainability systems, this is evidenced through inclusion, safety, freedom of choice and movement, and access to education and healthcare.
Proactive support for gender equality should also exist beyond standards. The toolkit provides numerous examples of how to integrate gender-responsiveness in organisations, including hiring gender experts, promoting gender-responsive policies, and making gender-responsiveness a performance metric.
Additionally, the toolkit highlights how sustainability systems should incorporate gender equality processes within their programmatic work, to strengthen women’s capacities for leadership positions, address women’s unpaid care work, and maintain efforts to prevent sexual harassment and violence against women and girls.
Good practice examples
At ISEAL, we’re seeing more and more Community Members exploring how they can tackle gender inequalities. As well as working to integrate gender into their standards and the management of their organisations.
Gold Standard created a ‘gender ecosystem’, whereby gender, along with social inclusion, is maintained at the centre of their projects’ life cycles.
They require all certified entities to comply with their ‘do no harm’ safeguard. They must implement policies, strategies, and action plans to promote gender equality within their organisations, such as gender pay gap analysis and gender sensitive stakeholder engagement.
Gold Standard also requires that certified entities strive towards gender-sensitive certification.
Similarly, Fairtrade International take a proactive stance towards gender equality within their standards.
They worked with their small-scale producer organisations to make it mandatory for all certified entities to meet certain gender requirements. For example, women must be involved in boards or leadership positions within their organisation.
The toolkit notes how the Women’s Accelerator Fund 2.0, a multi-stakeholder programme managed by IDH, is seeking to confront gender-based violence in India’s tea sector, whilst empowering and improving safety for women throughout supply chains.
The importance of data
Gender-disaggregated data underpins all the approaches highlighted in the toolkit. Generating reliable data and following best practice for using that data to inform decision-making are critical.
Robust evidence of gender-issues within supply chains gives the right capacity to measure changes in gender equality. The toolkit presents key resources to support sustainability systems in these efforts.
Gender-based issues present differently across supply chains. Recognising this, the toolkit highlights value chain analysis as the best first step to understand the challenges women and girls face.
This enables understanding on the extent of gender-based constraints, from access to productive resources to how much power and agency women have in their roles. From such data, a gender benchmarking process can be undertaken.
The toolkit presents four main sections of gender-responsive indicators and intervention strategies: reach, benefit, empowerment, and transformation.
Taking a holistic approach
We cannot focus on one approach if we are to tackle gender-based issues in global value chains.
Sustainability systems must ensure they are taking assured and reliable approaches that address all parts of their systems, becoming accountable for their performance on gender-based issues.
Then they can advance gender-responsiveness, becoming a driving force in improving gender equality in global value chains.