By Spogmay Ahmed
On September 20, 2014 the United Nations launched the HeForShe campaign, a worldwide effort to engage men in the promotion of women’s rights. Over 200,000 men and boys have since signed the pledge to support gender equality, and the social media movement has reached more than 1.2 billion people.
The HeForShe campaign’s most recent initiative, IMPACT 10x10x10, calls upon governments, businesses, and universities to take a more active role in promoting gender equality. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2014 reveals a large discrepancy between men and women in their access to politics and economic empowerment.
In line with the theme for 2015 International Women’s Day – “Make it Happen” – IMPACT 10x10x10 offers those three key sectors guiding recommendations on how to enhance women’s roles in each respective community.
Regarding the business sector, IMPACT 10x10x10 proposes a set of Women’s Empowerment Principles that integrate a basis for gender equality into common business practices. The seven core principles are:
- Establish high-level corporate leadership for gender equality
- Treat all women and men fairly at work – respect and support human rights and nondiscrimination
- Ensure the health, safety and well-being of all women and men workers
- Promote education, training and professional development for women
- Implement enterprise development, supply chain and marketing practices that empower women
- Promote equality through community initiatives and advocacy
- Measure and publicly report on progress to achieve gender equality
These principles set a positive precedent for pursuing gender equality in the workplace, but they fall short of bridging the gender gap in access to economic opportunity. Women may be offered greater resources within the business community, but they still face challenges entering the business community. For this, women’s economic empowerment relies on the support of men at all levels – husbands, fathers, and local business and community leaders – to ensure that women are provided equal access to the marketplace and can overcome traditional gender barriers without fear of limitations.
Women’s economic agency depends on a challenging of gender norms and patriarchal power structures. Empowerment initiatives ought to begin at the smallest unit: the household. A pilot project conducted with CARE-Rwanda’s Village Savings and Loan (VSL) program engages local men in the process of offering microfinance loans to their female partners.
The study finds that male dominance in the household hinders women’s access to financial services and economic activity. Women’s contribution to household income therefore relies on their share of marital bargaining power – which is heavily determined by the prevalence of gender-based violence in the home.
Depending on the context, gender-based violence can either be quelled or caused by women’s economic empowerment. Whereas women’s income gains ultimately benefit the whole family, men do not always react positively to this shift in household dynamics. Therefore, development policymakers must engage men in women’s economic empowerment at all levels. The HeForShe campaign’s focus on male business leaders needs a complement at the household level.
Just as IMPACT 10x10x10 offers recommendations to businesses, the campaign would benefit from expanding its approach to suit more localized contexts. CARE’s VSL approach ran group education activities, worked individually with men, and created a manual and training process to ensure men’s involvement and support for women’s economic empowerment.
Ultimately, the study found that the VSL programs reduced gender-based violence against women. Likewise, men’s participation in group training sessions resulted in improved incomes for poor households as men were found more welcoming to women’s economic activity. Traditional gender norms also shifted when men from the experimental group took part in care work otherwise delegated solely to women.
With a more comprehensive approach, women can gain greater access to the economy and advance faster in the business sector. The HeForShe campaign takes a positive first step. Businesses ought to adopt its guiding recommendations, and development practitioners must replicate its model at a more local level.
This International Women’s Day, “making it happen” will not only depend on women’s advancement, but also male support and active participation. In the end, women’s empowerment serves as a prerequisite for a more prosperous society overall.
Spogmay Ahmed is a Women’s Entrepreneurship Intern at CIPE.