by Kimberly Maldonado, Consultant - Transforming the Future of Work for Gender Equality

Now more than ever, the world is poised to leverage innovation to achieve greater gender equality in all spheres of life. With increased internet penetration, unlimited access to information, and upskilling opportunities due to technological advances, achieving transformative change in addressing gender inequalities has become more attainable.

Gender equality and innovation are rarely discussed within the same context, but each has essential value for human progress and development. Both innovation and gender equality underpin all the Sustainable Development Goals, and both require pushing boundaries and stepping into the unknown. Both endeavours require disrupting old views and perceptions and challenging established ways of doing things. Transformative technology and non-tech innovations that challenge mindsets present a particularly exciting pathway for seizing the opportunity in achieving the goals of gender equality — goals that have been so difficult to realize in the past.

At the most general level, innovations can benefit women by merely improving their well-being in terms of health and income. Beyond necessary improvements in well-being, innovations can lead to women’s empowerment, securing resources and freedom for women to make decisions, build confidence, and act in their interests. Truly transformative innovations challenge existing mindsets and reshape men’s and women’s long-term roles, and this is precisely the level of innovation the UNDP’s Transforming the Future of Work for Gender Equality Initiative aims for.

With the future of work bringing new technologies and a shifting labour market, the UNDP’s Transforming the Future of Work for Gender Equality (TFOW4GE) regional initiative sought to start by building a microcosm of the systems change we want to see; to provide COs with the space to experiment on a small scale, take risks & learn from failures. This allowed them to test an idea that would provide women with the skills to make them future ready and address existing barriers that prevent women from getting into, remaining and progressing in the labour force.

The five country-level prototypes implemented in Maldives, Thailand, Malaysia, Fiji, and India  have explored tech and non-tech innovations to bring about transformative change to women’s access to opportunities, resources, and time in the face of the changing world of work. Furthermore, these protypes helped Country Offices to address critical domains in the gender equality ecosystem including agency, structural & relational dynamics.

For example, In Fiji, UNDP worked with a multidisciplinary team and female farmers to redefine the PAC FARMER application, an existing digital finance tool, through a Human-Centered Design process to increase its relevance and usage among rural women market vendors and rural women micro-entrepreneurs in Fiji.  Through this intervention, we have seen a change in perceptions amongst rural women micro-entrepreneurs to be inclined to access digital financing tools to increase productivity and financial gains.  

Employing these innovative methods at a pivotal point in the changing labour market, TFOW4GE has paved the way for a disruptive, systematic, and deep-rooted challenge to gender inequality. It highlighted how virtuous circles of change can be created by women’s increased access to technology and a change in social norms and attitudes about what is possible for women.

Furthermore, beyond the more commonly known innovative methods, these prototypes allowed us to explore insights further that, if applied, would be disruptive to the system in a way that could potentially accelerate gender equality efforts in their country. Driving our work, was the idea that it is essential not only to support increased women’s access to technological innovations but also to bring thought innovation into the solutions we design to reduce social barriers that continue to limit women’s access to opportunities and equitable development outcome.

After the implementation of the country prototypes, the regional gender team at the Bangkok Regional Hub organized a Regional Lab that brought together the cohort of five Country Offices implementing the TFOW4GE solution prototypes, gender focal points, Accelerator Lab colleagues, and financial inclusion specialists to use the insights from the prototypes to discuss opportunities and design potential service offerings, combining assets and capabilities from Country Offices and the region. 

Beyond the individual impact of each country prototype, practical insights were shared and identified across solution prototypes, which led to the identification of common design principles to guide gender-responsive programmes/projects and the mapping of persistent drivers of gender inequality rooted around traditional concepts of masculinity and femininity. 

What’s next?

In recent efforts to take forward the five design principles identified during the TFOW4GE journey and the Gender Learning Lab methodology, the Gender team and the DRR team at BRH facilitated the ‘Gender and Disaster Risk Reduction: Learning Sessions’ for over 70 DRR practitioners in Asia-Pacific to integrate more robust gender perspectives into existing and planned DRR projects. 

After months of continuous work and learning based on the prototype and regional lab, we are exploring strategic opportunities to continue addressing some of the persistent drivers of gender inequality in the context of the new normal. This crisis provides us with an opportunity to build forward differently, one that is inclusive, resilient, and works for all.