Context

In 2014, the G20 Leaders made a firm commitment to promote women’s leadership and increase their workforce participation and pledged to reduce the gender gap in labour force participation by 25 percent by 2025. Women’s empowerment has been a cross-cutting priority area for several G20 Presidencies.

The inaugural G20 Ministerial Conference on Women’s Empowerment under the 2021 Italian Presidency of the G20 laid out the forum’s vision of consolidating the various discussions on women’s empowerment and gender equality within the G20. The aim was to make a transition from focusing on advancing women’s development to a more proactive agenda on making progress through women-led development. Initially, the two main themes under the G20’s focus were: (i) STEM, digital and financial literacy, environment, and sustainability; and (ii) labour and economic empowerment and achieving work-life balance. The 2022 Indonesian G20 Presidency continued to build on the G20’s previous efforts through various workstreams, ensuring the continuity of G20-led initiatives on women’s empowerment for sustained economic growth.

Consolidating the Women-led Development Agenda under G20 India

Under India’s G20 presidency this year, women-led development has emerged as a central priority. It acknowledges that crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, have disproportionately affected women and girls worldwide. However, these crises have also highlighted the positive impact of women’s leadership and decision-making in various contexts. As the world strives to build a better future, it is crucial to ensure a gender-responsive and equitable recovery.

The Indian Presidency will continue to build on previous G20 initiatives like #eSkills4Girls (that aims to reduce the existing gender digital divide in particular in low income and developing countries), G20 EMPOWER (that aims at accelerating women’s leadership and empowerment in the private sector), Roadmap Towards and Beyond the Brisbane Goal, G20 Policy Recommendations to Reduce Gender Gaps in Labour Force Participation and Pay by Improving Women’s Job Quality (Germany 2017), and the discussions at the W20 engagement group and the G20 Women’s Ministerial Meeting.

Anchoring these efforts within the G20 Development Working Group (DWG), the Indian G20 Presidency aims to ensure a Global South-focused, development-oriented approach to align with institutions and mechanisms established under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework.

To address the agenda of women-led development, the Think20 (T20) India, the G20 Alliance for the Empowerment and Progression of Women’s Economic Representation (G20 EMPOWER), the Women20 (W20), and the Civil20 (C20) organised a day-long conference with delegates from G20 countries bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise, contributing to three roundtable discussions on women in business, women in STEM, and promoting women’s leadership for one future.

Recommendations

Each of the three sessions focused on delineating a set of concrete recommendations or action points for the G20 countries to advance women’s empowerment. The discussion yielded 12 actionable points for the consideration of the G20. These recommendations can form the basis of the women-led development agenda to be taken forward by the subsequent G20 summits in Brazil, South Africa, and beyond.

The recommendations are classified under three broad pillars of work—mitigating gender inequalities, adopting a sector-specific approach to target and improve female workforce participation, and unlock the potential of finance in advancing the women-led development agenda.

Mitigating Gender Inequalities

Recommendation 1: Establishing a rural-urban tech bridge to mitigate regional disparities in women-led development, providing women across spaces with a platform to collaborate to find solutions around aspects such as financial and digital inclusivity and leadership programmes, and generate a toolkit that aggregates existing policies, programmes, and initiatives undertaken across the G20 to mitigate gender disparities.

Recommendation 2: Push for collection, processing (to generate valuable insights), and facilitation of cross-border flows of gender-disaggregated data across all G20 economies to advance the 2030 Agenda and SDG 5 (Gender Equality), in particular.

Recommendation 3: Approach the care economy from a workforce participation framework to ensure its formalisation and appropriate economic valuation of care work.

Recommendation 4: Leveraging opportunities presented by digital transformations to ensure alternate forms of engagement and/or employment of women involved in care work and advancing women’s digital literacy, regardless of their location, demographic group, or nature of employment.

Recommendation 5: Introduce gender-sensitive labour policies targeted for care workers, such as insurance products, aimed to provide social security for women out of employment to provide care services at home. Introducing standards within the care economy and recognising care work as an industry is a fundamental perquisite in this regard.

Adopting a Sector-Specific Approach

Recommendation 6: Create jobs, prepare for, and promote female workforce participation in green and blue economies across the G20 through appropriate skill development and training programmes that focus on finance, technology, leadership, entrepreneurship, and STEM fields.

Recommendation 7: Revamping and strengthening the existing workforce arrangements available to women in agriculture and addressing specific barriers in their access to productive assets.

Recommendation 8: Promoting the cooperative societies as a model to advance economic participation, empowerment, and leadership role of women across sectors. By leveraging complementarities in strengths and economies of scale, cooperative business models can ease the process of value chain integration and market access for women-owned and women-led businesses.

Recommendation 9: Establish frameworks and strengthen processes that prioritise and facilitate procurement from women-owned Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises through procurement contracts and supply chain integration. Creating mechanisms that specifically support and promote the involvement of women-owned businesses in procurement processes can also be beneficial.

Unlocking the Potential of Finance

Recommendation 10: Create processes to enhance financial sector accountability towards women lenders, gender-sensitise the existing collateral system for lending, and innovate alternative gender-responsive credit systems within the G20 economies.

Recommendation 11: Upgrade the G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion’s SME Finance Sub-Group target for investment into women-owned businesses up to 30 percent.

Recommendation 12: Reinventing the role of social stock exchanges across the G20 economies to unlock the potential of private capital in creating opportunities for women entrepreneurship, capacity building, and provisioning funds for improvements in digital financial inclusion.

Conclusion

To fast-track and realise the G20’s goal of bridging gender gaps in workforce participation by at least 25 percent in the next two years, there is a need to recognise, act upon these core priorities of the women-led development agenda, and introduce and facilitate broad-based systemic changes. This Joint Engagement Groups Roundtable on Women-Led Development was an effort to bring together the diverse perspectives emerging within this space and generate a congruent set of ideas or actionable steps for the G20 Leaders’ considerations.