Gender Focus on the Just Energy Transition
- Women Working Worldwide
- Aug 27
- 4 min read
With the energy transition underway to varying extents in nations around the world, efforts to move from fossil fuels to renewable energy must address the gender inequities perpetuated by the oil and gas industries. At Women Working Worldwide, we want to ensure that women aren’t excluded from opportunities in the emerging green energy sector by highlighting the structural and cultural barriers that remain unaddressed. Additionally, we promote gender-sensitive climate policies that address the historical disadvantages faced by women in and affected by the energy industry. For example, we promote the work of other intersectional environmental groups such as Women’s Environmental Network (WEN), WWF and Spark, who are delivering gender focussed renewable energy and climate campaigns. These campaigns can transform risks into opportunities for women’s engagement and empowerment.
Following on from our previous blog ‘The Climate and Gender Impacts of the Traditional Energy Sectors’, where we discussed the gender impacts of oil, gas and coal supply chains, we are now going to explore how we prevent the same, and similar, injustices from seeping into new and emerging renewable and low-carbon energy supply chains.
Thinking about the decrease in demand for employees and the reallocation of jobs, as we begin to move from carbon-intensive industries to low-carbon sectors, we can see how the reduction in labour requirements response may impact different genders differently. This could potentially worsen existing gender gaps in the labour market. That being said, there is some good news in that there are increasing opportunities for women to be engaged in the renewable energy labour market due to investment in green skills development, social protection, education and health policies!
Gender equality in the extractive industries…
The extractive energy industries have left a lasting environmental and social impact, and they have usually failed to realise the importance of taking a gender-responsive approach to human rights and environmental due diligence. A starting point might be to take guidance from the United Nations Working Group on Business and Human Rights, which issued a Gender Guidance for states and businesses in 2019, as well as the following reports:
UN Women ‘Gender Equality in the Sustainable Energy Transition’ (2023)
Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) ‘Gender and the Environment: Building the Evidence Base and Advancing Policy Action to Achieve the SDGs’ (2021)
UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Number 7 ‘Affordable and Clean Energy’
A great place to start in understanding how a “just energy transition” can look, if done right, is the ‘The Gendered Effects of Electrification in sub-Saharan Africa’, by L.Clark. The following list highlights the benefits of electrification on women’s lives:
Addresses ‘time poverty’ - a result of the disproportionate amount of time spent on unpaid work, mostly domestic labour, between men and women in society
Creates opportunities for education, employment, and economic empowerment
Reduces harmful indoor air pollution
Enhances maternal health
Decreases vulnerability to gender-based violence
Helps shift social norms by enabling access to information
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) also carried out surveys to investigate the barriers to women’s participation in the move to renewable energy.. The three most cited barriers were i) cultural and social norms, ii) lack of gender-sensitive policies and iii) lack of training opportunities and inequity in ownership of assets. Helping to break down these barriers is essential in achieving both the benefits of increased employment of women in the industry and increased access to clean energy.
Opening the doors to clean energy - do women have access?
Clean cookstoves, access to clean cooking fuels and well-ventilated living and cooking spaces are just some of the ways we can work to decrease the impacts on women at the consumer-end of traditional energy supply chains. Women still carry the largest burden of cooking activities worldwide, the lack of access to clean energy limits their options for work, exposes them to adverse health risks, and forces them and their children to forage for wood or other combustible materials for cooking and heating fuel. There have been some great cases of innovation in designing and constructing cookstoves to reduce the amount of harmful fumes such as Carbon Monoxide and Nitrous Oxides. This has been done through improved venting and design of indoor cooking stoves to improve combustion efficiency and reduce the pollution into the unventilated indoor cooking spaces. Work has also been carried out to improve combustion efficiency and reduce the amount of fuel needed. Take a look at the work of Mukuru Clean Stoves in Kenya, and EcoSwell in northern Peru for some inspiration!
Conclusion and next steps…
As we continue the journey of a “just energy transition”, we will continue to work to ensure women are involved in technology design and implementation, as well as developing policy and financing solutions. These will address existing gender inequity and ensure the story of the traditional energy industry does not repeat itself. What would a just, “gender-responsive energy transition” look like to you? Do comment here or email us at contact@women-ww.org, we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Comments