Toolkit – Better Practices Addressing Women’s Representation in the Workplace

Addressing gender inequality in the workplace is an important and ongoing challenge, particularly in certain sectors such as finance and scientific areas. There are persistent gender representation and pay gaps in management and leadership positions. This toolkit aims to improve understandings of gender inequality and help organisations, businesses, managers and leaders explore ways to improve the representation of women in organisations, employment, and managerial and leadership positions. The toolkit provides evidence of better practices that could be adopted and implemented in your organisation.

The difference of this toolkit from other published toolkits originates from the Transformative Equality Approach (TEA) of the European Commission-funded project Realising Girls’ and Women’s Inclusion, Representation and Empowerment (RE-WIRING). The project shows that efforts such as mentoring, coaching, role models, training, networking and sponsorship have been around for decades but did not really address the root causes of inequality because of the prevalence and persistence of gender inequality. Why have efforts not worked? The root causes of gender inequality have not been addressed. The RE-WIRING project is not about going through the obvious, well-known paths but provides insights into inherent power structures in organisations that perpetuate gender inequality. The toolkit highlights strategic and tactical measures of addressing gender inequality, which interact and influence each other. The whole system creates and perpetuates inequalities so organisations need to become aware of the framework and the fundamental role of unequal power dynamics behind the framework.