This article is written by Amy-Willard Cross, founder of Gender Fair, a public benefit corporation.

  • The problem: We won’t reach gender equality for 130 years.
  • Why it matters: Women’s economic rights are key to sustainable development, economic growth and peace and security.
  • The solution: Governments can improve workforce equality by asking their vendors to report on gender year over year.

It will take hundreds of years for women to reach equality. After the pandemic, that delivery date moved further away as The World Economic Forum added more decades to the dreamed-of ETA. The Covid-19 era amplified and widened gaps already present – in the workplace, marketplace and society – significantly impeding women’s economic progress.

💬 Let the author know what you think by leaving a comment below

Various mechanisms hacked away at gender inequality and brought lurches of improvements over the last few decades. Some governments legislated equal pay, or more women on boards. Shareholders advocated for parental leave and diversity reporting. Workers or advocacy groups fought for fair pay and reproductive access. To make measurable progress on SDG5 (Gender Equality), there needs to be a new approach – fixing the problems requires real power and significant leverage, in other words – money and lots of it.

Gender-responsive procurement

There’s a new way to deploy capital in service of SDG5: Gender Responsive – or gender lens – Procurement (GRP).

Your money can match your values.

It’s happening in both the private and public sectors and goes way beyond supplier diversity in potential impact. Many governments and private companies set targets to buy from women- or minority, or under-represented group-owned businesses. But those directives only reach about 5-10% of spending. So about 90% of public or B2B spending goes to companies that might have terrible records on gender equality since there is no oversight. Most purchasing agents have no due diligence on the treatment of women; indeed, their vendors' policies and culture could be antithetical to their own values of equality.

However, if a municipality or country has policies, laws and programmes to advance women in the economy, their spending can reinforce those goals. Your money can match your values. As Joe Keefe, founder of the first gender lens investment fund PAX, explained to women philanthropists: donating millions to women's organisations, without putting a gender lens on investments, is like throwing the donations away. Just as consumers may request marine steward-certified fish, or cruelty-free shampoo from the market, so too government (or corporate) procurement offices can request that suppliers prove they have the same values evidenced by certain policies and programmes – such as equal pay studies, high levels of women’s leadership, diverse employee base, family leave, and indeed, they have started.

Ethical purchasing in the private sector

Over the last few years, the US private sector has started to make demands or requests of its large suppliers, asking for various information on diversity, for example, equal pay etc.

HP and others ask law firms or ad agencies to present diverse teams. Cisco asks its contingent workforce to report on diversity. Microsoft requests suppliers provide parental leave. These approaches are scattershot and ad hoc, lacking a holistic view. However, this year, UN Women released a tool for signatories of the Women Empowerment Principles (WEPS) to help practice GRP, which includes buying from women-owned suppliers, as well as promoting equality in large suppliers. Logitech, Zoetis, Salesforce, Quinnox, Andela and others formed a coalition in 2022; each requests their vendors to report on their workforces, using Gender Fair’s holistic assessment (also based on the WEPS). The group plans to release a public database of B2B vendors in 2024 to push forward this new concept.

Current moves to gender-responsive public procurement

Of course, real people pressure the marketplace with their spending – but the masses must act in concert: millions of shampoo purchases must be bundled to make an impact. However, large public procurement accounts can throw their weight around – which will be felt by the sometimes handsy hands of the free market. After all, procurement budgets average around 12% of GDP, and those POs will have many zeroes. This represents an enormous opportunity for governments to use another tool for advancing equality. And it’s starting.

The OECD paper, ‘Promoting gender equality through public procurement’, shows how “governments and public buyers can use their purchasing power to promote gender equality and encourage suppliers to improve their performance on women’s empowerment.” This approach can reinforce gender policy actions across agencies – and beyond – creating synergies that could scale. That paper shows that 57% of countries have some sort of framework for incorporating gender in procurement and includes the first three examples below:

  • Switzerland requires companies to have equality in pay for men/women to be eligible for government contracts.
  • The Japanese government assigns more points to tender evaluations for public procurement to those with certifications on gender-related issues.
  • In Mexico, contracting authorities are required to award points to companies applying policies and practices to reduce gender inequalities.
  • Contractors to the US federal government must provide an analysis of employment practices and compensation.

Again, those measures are mostly ad hoc. GRP has advanced the most in Australia which promotes equality through its Workplace Gender Equality Agency: since 2012, all organisations with more than 100 employees must demonstrate compliance in six different areas. The Australian Federal Government requires some bidders to be in compliance with WGEA, and are helped along by a Workplace Gender Equality Procurement Principles and User Guide. In some states, suppliers that do well can be designated an employer or supplier of choice. In Western Australia, a programme called Stronger Together uses “the purchasing power of the WA Government to improve gender equality by supporting suppliers to implement gender equality practices.” Calling itself “a major capital investor, asset manager and purchaser of goods and services,” the state government leverages those roles to raise awareness and create behaviour change to progress gender equality. Suppliers report on things such as: workforce gender composition, governing bodies of employers, equal remuneration between men and women, flexible work and prevention of sex-based harassment/ discrimination.

Putting your money where your mouth is

Spending provides a concrete mechanism of action to promote equality and reinforce policy. It’s a way to operationalise principles of equality. It’s too early to see change from the GRP. The US government mandate for supplier diversity has helped move capital to countless women- or minority-owned businesses. Indeed, it spread the practice to the private sector so that 35 companies spend a billion or more on diverse vendors – by way of the Billion Dollar Roundtable. We know that market mechanisms work to drive and reinforce change in the private sector. An excellent example is The Human Rights Campaign Index Corporate Equality Index. This US organisation for LGBTQIA rights, surveyed large companies on policies, graded and published the ratings; after 15 years, 800 received a perfect score, 1,500 have altered policies which improve the lives of tens of millions of US workers. Every year, the organisation pushes for continuous improvement. Were other levels of government to apply the same pressure, it might improve thousands more workforces.

All levels of government bodies seeking improvements for women can help achieve policy goals in the private marketplace through procurement, as some are just starting to do. If the industry also adopts a gender lens on spending, those conjoining demands for gender equality to suppliers will become normalised and “business as usual”. Indeed, both sectors acting in concert will have an exponential effect to drive real lasting progress on SDG5 and at scale.

Done reading? Make sure to share your own tips by leaving a comment below ⬇️

(Image credit: Unsplash)