The 2024 Forum will address advancing gender equality amid green, energy, and digital transitions. Discussions will highlight gendered impacts and potential exacerbation of disparities, particularly for vulnerable groups. Opportunities, innovative strategies, and policies, including through development cooperation, will be explored to empower women to thrive in the digital age and ensure their equal participation in sustainability efforts.
The OECD Forum on Gender Equality
2024 OECD Forum on Gender Equality
Context
The OECD’s Contribution to Promoting Gender Equality acknowledged the need to step up action on gender equality in building resilient and inclusive societies. Indeed, while the reports on the Implementation of the OECD Gender Recommendations [C/MIN(2022)7] [C-MIN(2017)7] [DCD/DAC(2021)/51] have shown considerable progress among OECD countries, gender equality remains elusive in all countries and this has been aggravated by the recent Health, Political and Humanitarian crisis.
Additionally, the ongoing global transitions, such as green and digital shifts, pose a risk of deepening gender inequalities. This highlights the urgent need for action. However, these shifts also present an unprecedented opportunity to unlock the latent potential of gender equality for more sustainable and inclusive economies while fostering resilience. Achieving this demands a strong political will and collaboration across policy areas to discover innovative and innovative solutions.
Main scope & key objectives
After a first meeting in 2024, the Forum will take place every two years to take stock of progress and identify innovative solutions to close remaining gender gaps.
The Forum has four strategic objectives, identified by the OECD as being decisive in closing remaining gender gaps:
Mainstream gender equality at the highest level across policy sectors to garner national and international political support.
Create a community of practice, building on the expertise of OECD areas of work, to facilitate policy dialogue, promote whole-of-government approaches to gender mainstreaming across sectors and identify evidence of progress.
Facilitate finding innovative and collaborative solutions to overcome cross-cutting challenges in OECD Members and Non-Members and harness the latent potential of gender equality in building resilient and inclusive societies and promoting development.
Enhance OECD’s efforts to strengthen the capacities, tools, and resources available to policymakers in promoting gender equality in the context of global transitions, in line with the OECD Gender Recommendations, and other OECD tools on gender equality.
Key focus areas
Gender equality and the green and energy transition
Green and energy transitions can present significant opportunities to unlock the potential of gender equality and close gender gaps. Women can also play a significant role in accelerating the transition. Yet, they continue being underrepresented in environment-related and energy sectors.
Women often endure the most of climate change impacts due to facing social, economic, and political barriers, while also being at increased risk of natural disaster impacts . To this end, the Forum would serve as a platform that convenes experts across relevant OECD Committees to discuss the intersections between gender and the green and energy sectors. To create gender-transformative approaches to the green and energy transition, a wide range of areas for action could be identified, including gender and climate change and disaster risk management, as well as the new opportunities offered by the green economy, sustainable consumption and production patterns, and sustainable infrastructure.
Gender equality and the digital transition
Bridging the gender digital divide can allow for inclusive and equitable digital transition. Notably, it is essential to ensure women's access to digital skills, for example by promoting the involvement of women in STEM from elementary education, including by fighting stereotypes and promoting their participation in the labour market and in technology sectors.
Addressing biases in artificial intelligence and tech innovation is also crucial to prevent perpetuating gender inequalities. To this end, the Forum highlights innovative and cross-sectoral solutions, which enable all groups in society to fully contribute and benefit from the potential offered by technologies, while ensuring their protection and mitigating risks.
Removing barriers to equality
The work on ensuring gender equality for inclusive transitions will be rooted in the long-standing OECD efforts to close transversal gender gaps across Member and Non-Member countries, through:
Enabling equal access to opportunities –closing gaps in participation, working hours and gender-balanced leadership would boost economic growth, foster more inclusive decision-making processes, with enhanced innovation and social participation. The Forum will provide a platform to intensify OECD efforts in strategic areas such as balancing work and family responsibilities, taxation policies, women’s access to and participation in green and STEM fields, employment, entrepreneurship, and public life.
Fighting harmful social norms and gender-based violence - harmful social norms, deep-rooted socio-cultural biases, stereotypes and discriminatory laws and practices continue to prevent societies, and women and girls specifically, from reaching their full potential. Moreover, gender-based violence and harassment in all spheres of life continue to hinder women’s empowerment. This work will aim to focus on developing solutions to better support victim/survivors of all forms of GBV, remove persistent and emerging barriers to full participation in public and private lives, in particular harmful social norms, sexual exploitation abuse and harassment, economic violence, and online harassment.
Enhancing gender mainstreaming, government capacities and data availability – Enhanced gender mainstreaming across sectors requires leadership, expertise, monitoring and accountability mechanisms, resources, co-ordination mechanisms and gender-disaggregated and intersectional data across key policy areas. The Forum will provide opportunities to exchange practices and lessons learned in strengthening
