What are gender-responsive employment policies?

Gender-responsive employment policies explicitly pursue gender-equality objectives, through the creation of full, productive and freely chosen employment for all, guided by the normative framework provided by ILO Convention 122 and Recommendation 169. These policies are based on diagnoses of how policy options affect women and men differently.  
 

Gender equality objectives help in overcoming the structural challenges that hold women back in the labour market. Prominent among those challenges are the gender pay gap; sectoral and occupational segregation; a lack of access to good quality care services, and the unequal sharing of care responsibilities between women and men.

The ILO argues for taking a comprehensive and integrated policy approach towards employment promotion, based on a recognition that employment outcomes depend on a wide array of factors, and that markets alone might not be able to create enough decent employment opportunities, especially for women. The Third Recurrent Discussion on Employment emphasised the importance of gender-responsive employment policies in tackling gender inequalities and boosting women's labour market participation. 

Gender-responsive employment policies include measures that support job creation and transitions in the labour market. Sometimes these measures are embedded into National Employment Policies.

Gender-responsive job creation strategies: 

a. Macroeconomic policies that explicitly promote gender equality concerns, which are embedded within fiscal and monetary policies. Fiscal stimulus packages of the kind put in place when macroeconomic crises unfold comprise specific measures to support women and girls in critical policy areas (livelihoods, social protection, health, food security, and public infrastructure and housing). Whether or not the packages provided new resources or only reallocated existing resources had an impact on the size of the fiscal stimulus, and therefore on the ensuing recovery. Monetary policies, in turn, can provide liquidity to governments, households and businesses that enables them to avoid bankruptcy and debt build-up, which slows the recovery. Gender-responsive macroeconomic policies, when coherent with sectoral policies within a comprehensive employment policy framework, can contribute to create decent employment opportunities for both women and men.

b. Sectoral employment policies that promote a just transition to a gender-equitable, job-rich and environmentally-sustainable economy. The policies that lead to a gender-equitable structural transformation vary from country to country, but what they have in common is a recognition of women as producers, wage earners and unpaid carers, channelling investment to support them in these roles. Industrial policies should enable women and men alike to benefit equally from the creation of jobs, including in new green industries and in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The GENSEC Policy Tool offers key criteria and indicators to identify the sectors that would maximize decent employment opportunities for women. And it also helps to identify opportunities for removing barriers that prevent women from entering dynamic and high-productivity sectors. 

c. Gender-responsive employment programmes that guarantee that women benefit from the assets created, improved or maintained, from the services provided or the training received; maximise the potential of programmes to attract women and allow them to join; and make sites into gender-responsive workplaces, enabling women and men to work in a safe and healthy environment, accommodating women’s and men’s lifecycle needs, ensuring women and men are paid equally for work of equal value; preventing and addressing harassment and workplace violence; and providing inclusive but safe work facilities.

Gender-responsive transition strategies:

a. Active labour market policies that support women’s attachment to the labour market and guarantee their access to productive employment. These include, for example, job retention measures to prevent women from losing their jobs; wage subsidies with specific gender balance requirements supportive of women’s re-entry into employment; as well as policies that support women’s employability and job-readiness, for instance, through help in acquiring digital skills. Inclusive and gender-responsive approaches encourage women’s broader labour force participation and can in themselves accelerate the recovery.

b. Gender-responsive skills learning strategies and policies entail creating gender-sensitive training environments with zero-tolerance for discrimination and harassment, fostering opportunities for women in technology-intensive skills and occupations, and for men in care work through gender-responsive career development services, and encourage and enable women to participate in continuous professional development opportunities – that allow balancing work, training and care responsibilities.

c. Gender-responsive National Employment Policies (NEPs): A National Employment Policy is one concrete application of comprehensive employment policy frameworks for which the ILO stands. A National Employment Policy (NEP) typically reflects a country's approach to achieving their employment goals, covering quantity and quality dimensions and addressing both the demand and supply side of the labour market and matching the two; it follows a whole-of-government approach and brings together workers’ and employers’ representatives as well as other relevant stakeholders in order to first formulate and then implement employment policies; and typically takes the form of a standalone, comprehensive national policy document, although they could also include the integration of employment objectives into a national or regional development plan, or into other national policies and strategies, backed up by appropriate implementation mechanisms.  The Technical Guidance Note Gender-responsive National Employment Policies: A path for gender equality provides guidance to countries on how to develop and implement a gender-responsive NEPs, based on gender-responsive diagnostics and lessons learnt over 20 years of implementation.