Supported by the Secretariat of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions (BRS), Women Engage for a Common Future (WECF) has carried out gender-focused studies in Kenya working in partnership with Center for Environment Justice and Development (CEJAD), with ongoing studies in Rwanda and Zambia. These efforts have highlighted how women and men experience different impacts from hazardous chemicals and waste, and they have identified practices that can be scaled to advance both gender equality and sound chemicals governance.
The empowerment of women and girls concerns their gaining power and control over their own lives. It involves awareness-raising, building self-confidence, expansion of choices, increased access to and control over resources, and actions to transform the structures and institutions that reinforce and perpetuate gender discrimination and inequality. This implies that to be empowered they must not only have equal capabilities (such as education and health) and equal access to resources and opportunities (such as land and employment), but they must also have the agency to use these rights, capabilities, resources, and opportunities to make strategic choices and decisions (such as is provided through leadership opportunities and participation in political institutions).
In addition, UNESCO explains, “No one can empower another: only the individual can empower herself or himself to make choices or to speak out. However, institutions including international cooperation agencies can support processes that can nurture self-empowerment of individuals or groups”.
Inputs to promote the empowerment of women should facilitate women’s articulation of their needs and priorities and a more active role in promoting these interests and needs. Empowerment of women cannot be achieved in a vacuum; men must be brought along in the process of change. Empowerment should not be seen as a zero-sum game where gains for women automatically imply losses for men. In empowerment strategies, increasing women’s power does not refer to “power over” or controlling forms of power, but instead to alternative forms of power—“power to,” “power with,” and “power from within”—that emphasize the use of individual and collective strengths to achieve common goals without coercion or domination.
Source: UNICEF, UNFPA, UNDP, UN Women (2016): Gender Equality, UN Coherence and You; Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the Advancement of Women (now part of UN Women) (2001): Important Concepts Underlying Gender Mainstreaming; UNESCO GENIA (2019): Toolkit for Promoting Gender Equality in Education.
Gender (or sexual) division of labor: This is an important concept in basic gender analysis that helps deepen understanding about social relations as an entry point to sustainable change through development. The division of labor refers to the way each society divides work among men and women, boys and girls, according to socially established gender roles or what is considered suitable and valuable for each sex. Within the division of labor, there are several types of roles:
Productive roles: Activities carried out by men and women in order to produce goods and services either for sale, exchange, or to meet the subsistence needs of the family.
Reproductive roles: Activities needed to ensure the reproduction of society’s labor force. This includes housework like cleaning, cooking, childbearing, rearing, and caring for family members. These tasks are done mostly by women.
Community managing role: Activities undertaken primarily by women at the community level, as an extension of their reproductive role, to ensure the provision and maintenance of scarce resources of collective consumption such as water, health care, and education. This is voluntary unpaid work performed during “free” time.
Community politics role: Activities undertaken primarily by men at the community level, often within the framework of national politics. This officially recognized leadership role may be paid directly or result in increased power or status.
Triple role: This refers to the fact that women tend to work longer and more fragmented days than men as they are usually involved in three different roles: reproductive, productive, and community work.
This refers to the equal rights, responsibilities, and opportunities of women and men and girls and boys. Equality does not mean that women and men will become the same but that women’s and men’s rights, responsibilities, and opportunities will not depend on whether they are born male or female. Gender equality implies that the interests, needs, and priorities of both women and men are taken into consideration, recognizing the diversity of different groups of women and men. Gender equality is not a women’s issue but should concern and fully engage men as well as women. Equality between women and men is seen both as a human rights issue and as a precondition for, and indicator of, sustainable people-centered development.
The preferred terminology within the United Nations is gender equality rather than gender equity. Gender equity denotes an element of interpretation of social justice, usually based on tradition, custom, religion, or culture, which is most often to the detriment of women. Such use of equity in relation to the advancement of women has been determined to be unacceptable.
Gender mainstreaming refers to “the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.”
Gender-responsive approaches actively consider and address gender-specific differences. Their goal is to promote gender equality – for example, by implementing regulations that reduce the risks faced by women in female-dominated sectors, such as the textile or cosmetics industries. The term is commonly used in international political discourse.
Sex-disaggregated data is typically collected and analyzed in two biological categories: males and females, and then used to develop programs and policies. Sex-disaggregated health data tells you the numbers of men and women affected by a particular disease, condition, or cause of death (Gender Equity Unit, 2024). For example, human biomonitoring data is often disaggregated by sex for comparing population exposures between the sexes. When data is not disaggregated by sex, it is more difficult to identify real and potential inequalities (UNICEF, 2017).