pathways to change

Gender at Work’s approaches try to disrupt conventional thinking and tackle what are sometimes called “wicked” problems – those that have innumerable causes, are tough to describe, and don’t have one right answer. This requires engaging many stakeholders to build solutions together.

Gender at Work uses capacity development strategies such as gender action learning, strategic planning and program development, training, and reflective learning to engage with teams, organizations and networks. We work at three levels: 1) with specific projects and programs; 2) at an organizational level, and 3) in the larger field of knowledge and institutional change.

Our partnerships have included multi-year engagements that build the capacity of internal change agenda to improve teamwork or use gender action learning for systematic change. Take a look at our work with social change organizations in India. Partnerships have also included short-term contracts to support development of a gender policy, a strategic planning process or any other organizational priority.

We support organizations to undertake learning and evaluation from a gender equality and rights-based perspective. They do this using our analytical framework to map inter-connected change processes and collective impact. Partnership support can range from design and implementation of an evaluation for a program/portfolio to deepen understanding of change theory and help build leadership. Work can also include analytical support and training on practices such as “Most Significant Change”. Additionally, we provide guidance on innovative writing/story-telling techniques to identify shared strategies. Take a look at our work on Most Significant Change with Oxfam Novib Partners.

Our founders and associates collaborate with each other and a wide range of partners to pilot new approaches, analytical frameworks, and learning strategies in support of gender and institutional change. Through writing, speaking and increasing the use of social media, we are  developing Collaborations for Gender Equality to unite individuals working on different aspects of gender inequality so that we can test new ways of working across geography and mindsets. In the past two years, we have produced four books including Gender at Work: Theory and Practice for the 21st Century, Routledge. We have also produced accompanying multimedia resources that assemble the best thinking and experience on changing institutionalized gender discrimination in diverse organizational sites. And finally, we are producing articles, power-point presentations and other media on diverse issues related to gender equality. You can access some of these in our resource section!