Equality at the Top
STORY
A key goal for many organizations in their gender mainstreaming journey is to achieve gender parity in their senior leadership teams.
In 2018, Devex shared that, in their research of international development organizations, two out of three organizations do not have headquarter leadership teams that are gender balanced and one in five did not have any women on their leadership teams at all. A similar issue was found with boards of directors, where four out of five organizations had not achieved gender parity at the board level.
This lack of parity is not unique to our sector, yet there are still actions that we can take to mitigate the issue and support more women in leadership positions. In our interview with a gender specialist at OSCE, we learned that while their leadership team is not gender-balanced, they have taken several steps to fix this issue:
We have this OSCE gender parity strategy, which aims to achieve equal representation of women and men in all levels of staff and management by 2026. And every year data is collected by the Department of Human Resources, with the support of our section, and this data is available in the annual Progress reports.
Through the development of this strategy, OSCE has increased transparency around the gender composition of their most senior leadership teams and the level of progress made towards gender-parity. To find tools that can help your organization achieve similar results, consider the following solutions:
