Joint event – Gender Audit & Strategies to Integrate Gender Mainstreaming

Integrating gender mainstreaming and gender audits are critical steps in achieving gender equality and inclusion in workplaces. By undertaking a comprehensive assessment, identifying gaps, and implementing targeted strategies, organisations and companies can address gender biases, promote equal opportunities, and create an inclusive work environment. Through policy integration, budgeting, training, data analysis, and collaboration, workplaces can pave the way for a fairer, more equitable society where everyone can thrive regardless of gender identity.

With a focus on gender integration in the workplace, WECF sent out a gender audit questionnaire to the participants who wanted to avail of the services under the scope of Women4RES. The answers were collected in two rounds which were held simultaneously with our two rounds of the capacity building 5 -webinar series on women empowerment and gender equality in the RHC sector.

The gender audits were offered to W4RES awardees as part of the support services catalogue suggested by W4RES project to accelerate the women’s market uptake of RHC solutions.

On 13th June 2023, Marilys Louvet (WECF) and Sukhveen Kaur (WECF) conducted a joint event with the participants and partners to share the results of the gender audits and proposed recommendations in a toolkit.

Our first speaker, Marilys, introduced everyone to the concept of gender audit, why we need to conduct gender audits and the implementation process. The session continued as Sukhveen shed light on the results of the audit. She categorised the results into four parts: women's representation, policies, equal access and support and gendered technologies, highlighting the similarities and differences in the opinion among the participants. Marilys then introduced the recommendation toolkit and shared how to use and implement the toolkit.

Later, two gender tools: Gender Self-Assessment (GSA) and Gender Action Plan (GAP), were presented. The participants were asked to choose an option explaining the reason for conducting a gender audit. Hereafter, the participants went into a breakout session where they developed their personalised GAP and GSA strategies. The aim of the co-creation activity' First steps towards gender transformative changes' was not to get instant results but to understand the process, the impact of each stage, and how they are interlinked, but especially, to start thinking of the process.

This joint event was concluded by sharing the recommendations toolkit with participants, which can be personalised based on their answers. Hence, this event established the need for and importance of collecting sex/-gender disaggregated data, gender tools, and indicators for monitoring. The session also highlighted the need for conducting gender audits and the importance of gender mainstreaming in workplaces.  We thank all 29 initiatives that participated to the gender audits and joint event!

You can find the Gender audit recommendations following this link.