Where is experimentation and innovation emerging to advance gender justice?

International Women’s Day, a yearly call for gender equality, has existed since the turn of the 20th century. When it first began in 1911, social and economic upheaval was widespread. In Britain, the same year marked the beginning of the ‘great unrest’: a backlash to industrial shifts caused by stagnant wages and rising costs.

We now find ourselves in another era of ‘great unrest’. The climate transition leaves no sector or market untouched, no worker or community immune from the prospects and challenges it presents. In many countries, the transition, coupled with technological advances, has faced formidable resistance because of poor plans and policies that exacerbate inequalities, erode public trust, and ultimately leave workers and communities behind. The consequences for business are no longer abstract either: the transition is reshaping access to capital, workforce availability, policy alignment, and long-term competitiveness.

If done well, climate transitions present new opportunities to radically improve people’s lives. But this requires a reorientation from the aging systems of the past.  The idea of just transitions has gained momentum in recent years. It is an approach to decarbonisation that respects human rights and leaves no one behind. It is not just about the outcome, but the process, too—fairer, more inclusive and distributive global systems.

Just transitions are not only a means to protect worker, Indigenous peoples, and community rights, they can help fuse gender justice to the core of new industries and markets as they are being shaped. 

While turmoil is the dominant global narrative right now, examples of just transitions, where experimentation and innovation is advancing gender justice, are happening in real time, and deserving of more attention and investment. IHRB, through our JUST Stories project, has reported on just transitions that are changing systems so that women —traditionally excluded from decision-making— gain skills, agency, and power that lead to better outcomes for themselves and society.

Gender justice in the Gujarat desert

"Women are always willing to take on new challenges... asset creation is one of the surest ways to fight poverty... having access to a green asset, market linkages, support services all enable women to embark on a journey of empowerment, lift them out of poverty, and earn a life of dignity and self-respect."

These are the words of our partner, Reema Nanavaty, from the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India.  Reema is describing what ‘reshaping systems' means in practice. 

Salt is one of the world’s ubiquitous commodities. India is the third-largest salt producer globally, 80% of which comes from Gujarat, where Reema’s organisation SEWA has been working with women farmers. There are nearly 40,000 women salt farmers working in Gujarat, who are mostly excluded from decision-making processes that impact their lives, including wages and working conditions.  

The process of making salt entails extracting and drying brine water from deep within the earth using expensive and polluting diesel pumps. SEWA, the largest union of informal workers in India, partnered with the International Finance Corp (IFC), which is the World Bank’s private sector lending arm, and local Indian banks and philanthropies as well as SunEdison, an American energy company, to replace the diesel pumps with solar equivalents and to train the women as solar technicians. In doing so, the women slashed emissions and cut operational costs by 60%. They became energy entrepreneurs.  Today, they run their own cooperative that controls and maintains the solar energy infrastructure which they use, outside of salt season, as a temporary solar farm, selling surplus green electricity to India’s grid.  As a result, they’ve experienced an average of 600% gain in their income, have reduced 20,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually, and have drastically improved health outcomes. 

Gender justice in Barcelona’s housing market

Another example comes from Catalunya, in our built environment (buildings, infrastructure and cities which are responsible for over 40% of global CO2 emissions).  Housing is not often discussed as a gender issue but it should be. In many societies, women are denied the right to own property. Women, and in particular single parents, migrants and caregivers, are disproportionately affected by housing precarity and energy poverty.  

But things can, and do change. In Catalunya, we found that public authorities, civil society organisations, housing co-operatives, developers and energy companies are working together to shape an alternative and more sustainable public housing model that creates affordable and energy-efficient social housing.  

This matters because energy efficient buildings dramatically cut utility costs which directly increase women’s economic security. This project is also creating green construction and retrofit jobs that intentionally bring women and other excluded groups into the workforce, and challenges traditional gendered norms. 

Gender justice in supply chains and labour migration

IHRB’s database of just transitions, containing hundreds of projects, shares even more promising innovation across sectors where the workforce is primarily made up of women, such as the textile industry.  Our search for these innovations builds on what we have learned over the years about how women in supply chains have been persistently undermined and their rights harmed, such as what happened to women workers in Bangladesh’s garment sector during the COVID19 pandemic.

Women migrant workers and the systemic struggles they face are increasingly in focus. Migrant workers are already central to global supply chains and production, and climate change and transitions mean labour migration is only likely to increase (it has doubled since the 1990s). Women make up nearly half of all international migrants, with concentration in sectors characterised by weak regulation, informality, and dependence on intermediaries including domestic work, care, hospitality, agriculture, garments, and electronics.   

Migrant workers face discrimination and are particularly vulnerable to labour exploitation because of a myriad of structural reasons. Factors including recruitment fees, misinformation, contract substitution, passport retention, and employer-controlled housing create predictable conditions for abuse, including sexual violence and forced labour. These risks are intensified for women due to debt, isolation, gender norms, and restricted mobility. They are paid lower wages and work in more precarious conditions. 

Financing innovation

In the last few decades, there have been many globally recognised efforts to advance gender justice, from international years for women, a UN Commission on the Status of Women,  the Beijing Declaration, and UN Global Compact principles. But experimentation and innovation is happening in news ways via just transitions, as the stories I’ve shared show.  There is so much we can learn from the companies and communities behind these stories; of how just transitions are being used as the vehicle to tackle intersectional issues of justice, including gender equality. Despite this, investment and implementation are lagging - just 3% of international climate finance is allocated to just transition projects. It is time for finance, companies and philanthropists alike to seek out and support just transition innovation to unlock transformational change for women worldwide.