How Buenos Aires used public innovation to improve gender equality during Covid-19

This post is written by Julia Domeniconi, Marisa Miodosky and Naty Roji of Buenos Aires City Government

• The problem: Gender equality remains difficult to achieve.
• Why it matters: An imbalanced government results in imbalanced policies.
• The solution: The pandemic allowed a rethink of staffing and uncovered hidden talent.

Covid-19 exposed governments to a series of massive health, educational and safety challenges that demanded highly efficient and rapid responses. In Buenos Aires city thousands of civil servants paused their working routines and started new tasks to tackle the pandemic. For the Human Resources Undersecretariat, that strategy also included the organisation of 14,000 employees into remote working, the hiring of 3,600 new staff for the health sector, and passing and managing a new series of health and care leave schemes.

However, the emergency did not distract us from two of our strategic pillars: gender equality and innovation. Early in 2021, with the pandemic response better organised, we dusted off an idea of narrowing the gender gap in the Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) sector inside our government. Based on the knowledge generated for the City Gender Equality Strategy we are aware that at the national and city level there was a shortage of women working and/or trained in ICT, and that this gap constituted a constraint for women's progress and the city's development. Moreover, we are familiarised with the literature that states that the more diverse teams are, the higher, the efficiency they achieve (Hoogendoorn, et al, 2013).

We had a highly innovative project and a new institutionalisation for retaining and promoting talented women civil servants.

With that information in mind and given the rapìd response to the pandemic, shown by many government departments through digitalisation of public services such as teaching school classes, scheduling health appointments, and resolving judicial pledges, the promotion of women into the ICT sector became a double laudable goal.

Starting from the evidence

We strongly believe in data-driven decision making, so our first step was to delve into our data and confirm that while women are the majority in public employment (52%), they account only for 23% in the ICT sector in the public sector.

% of women in BA City Government, by sector 2021 Source: Human Resources Undersecretariat, administrative records, 2021

Secondly, we investigated our human resources files and found out that some 300 women have some sort of ICT background: they either have majored in technology at high school and/or have a university degree in engineering or computing but were working in other sectors.

Data are not only quantitative records, so we looked for the voices of the women. In a series of focus groups, we asked them about their interest in continuing learning, moving into the ICT sector and time availability to do the training. They were on board.

Finally, we consulted with the Human Resources focal points in each ministry and identified with them their more acute talent needs, as well as their willingness to receive recently trained women into their teams. While the shortage of ICT trained civil servants was a pattern across all ministries, there were very different needs that resulted in the project's learning profiles: data analyst, functional analyst, user experience designer and developer.

Looking for the right training

With clear talent demands and a bunch of women eager to learn, we started to look at the best cost-effective trainers. We found them inside our government. The agency for lifelong learning at the Ministry of Education has a track record in training people in ICT. We agreed with the agency to set aside some vacancies for women participating in our programme.

Similarly, we partnered with the Civil Service Training Institute to tailor their training on UX for the women in the project. In our interaction with these colleagues, we realised that in order to start an ICT training some minimum knowledge was required. Therefore, we launched the enrollment in the project and informed women that they will need to sit an exam in order to group them by level of knowledge.

From the beginning, we understood that we were innovating and wanted this initiative to be a pilot project. We expected about 100 applications and some 50 effectively entering into the project. To our surprise we had 360 women enrolled, and 300 hundred of them passed the levelling exam. That unexpected interest compelled us to find more training providers outside our organisation. We established excellent partnerships with universities and training centres.

Innovating at a very low cost

In Buenos Aires, civil service promotion is regulated by a series of norms ratified by the civil servants’ union. With this project, we were establishing an alternative advancement scheme. A partnership with civil servant representatives became a requirement in order to guarantee the project's sustainability. Given the relevance for the gender equality agenda (a hot topic in the public debate in Argentina), union leaders were delighted with the idea. We signed the agreement in a precedent fast way. They also helped in disseminating the project through their communication channels and became part of the selection board: a win-win!

Project design took us some 100 Zoom meetings during three months. We organised a group of 10 people who thought creatively about how to turn an idea into a project with application rules, selection process, academic curricula, placement tests, mentoring and communication campaign among other components. It was very comforting for us to have this weekly space for creative thinking where we tuned in our ideas and ended up with clear actionables for the next meeting. For HR people used to working with routine administrative procedures, the possibility to think out of the box and to contribute to improving others colleagues' lives could be strongly empowering, and even during isolation periods. For a more solid project design, we consulted with gender and public policy experts who contributed pro-bono with the knowledge and time given the innovative feature of the project.

We only invested our time, contacts, creativity and sheer hard work. As a result, we had a highly innovative project and a new institutionalisation for retaining and promoting talented women civil servants that we expect will be the catalyst for a wider cultural change and higher quality digital delivery of public services. — Julia Domeniconi, Marisa Miodosky and Naty Roji

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(Picture credit: Unsplash)