Human Rights Risks Are Not Gender-Neutral
On International Women’s Day #IWD, we celebrate women’s achievements all over the world.
We are also reminded that women and girls still face heightened human rights risks because of their gender. At Wallbrook, we help companies and investors assess and address human rights risks and impacts with a gender-responsive approach, recognising that these actual and potential impacts are often amplified for women and girls. To do this, we conduct meaningful stakeholder engagement that seeks to understand the gender dynamics underpinning human rights risks. When conducting site visits, interviews and group discussions, we see rightsholders as diverse and intersectional in their identities and address structural barriers to their participation.
Through embedding a gender analysis in our human rights work, we are able to identify a range of salient human rights risks to women, girls and other rightsholders who do not identify as men that may otherwise been missed. We also consider how women may be affected differently when gender intersects with other forms of identity-based discrimination, including age, colour, ethnicity, caste, class, religion, language, ability and marital status.
A gender-responsive approach is not just about identifying how businesses are impacting women, but understanding how social stigma and power imbalances make them more or less exposed to certain human rights risks. To mark #IWD and help raising awareness of how gender-specific risks manifest in companies’ day-to-day operations, we are sharing three such risks from recent projects we have worked on:
Risks to women human rights defenders in the digital space. Through our work advising leading social media companies on human rights, we have seen how women human rights defenders and politicians face heightened risks to their safety due to their online engagement. From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, women are active participants in civil society, however this typically comes with a heightened risk of online harassment. This includes threats of sexual violence, misogynistic public shaming, and claims that they do not follow certain cultural or societal expectations of how a woman should behave.
Risks to health and safety for women industrial workers. Our engagement with women workers in manufacturing and industrial roles found that they may only have access to uniforms and personal protective equipment (PPE) that are sized for men and poorly fitted. This creates a health and safety risk that only women workers are exposed to. Often, we work with companies that have initiatives to ensure women have properly fitted uniforms, but our on-the-ground research found that these can be inconsistently implemented.
Risk of workplace discrimination. Even for businesses with anti-harassment and discrimination policies and trainings, the risk of gender-based discrimination and violence persists. Women in male-dominated workplaces raise concerns about working on sites regularly visited by contractors, drivers and other non-employees, who often do not undergo anti-harassment and discrimination trainings. Incidents involving third-parties demonstrate the importance for businesses to continuously monitor and assess the on-the-ground implementation and effectiveness of their policies. We found that businesses need to reinforce their anti-harassment and discrimination trainings to all workers on site, for both employees and contractors. To help women feel safe in the workplace, companies also need to have in place grievance mechanisms that meet the criteria of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), with timely and impartial investigations, and those responsible held to account.