United States Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security

Overarching Vision

Women’s economic security is essential to the realization of their human rights and fundamental freedoms and to strengthening communities, promoting peaceful nations, and building resilient, growing economies. We envision a world where every person has equitable opportunity to engage in decent work that promotes dignity, to enjoy social and labor protections, to access professional networks, finance, and digital technologies, to innovate and engage in entrepreneurism, to advance into management and leadership positions, and to achieve economic stability; where the safety and security of every person is protected; and where all people are treated equitably and fairly at home and in schools, workplaces, and communities. When the entire population regardless of gender reaches its full economic potential, we will all benefit. The advancement of gender equity and equality is central to economic development and must be included and addressed as a cross-cutting issue to advance policy and development goals, including, but not limited to, education, health, climate response, nutrition, food security, and economic security. The United States will collaborate with local actors, governments, the private sector, and non-governmental and civil society organizations, among others, to achieve this vision.

Executive Summary

The United States Government developed this first-ever interagency Strategy to advance Women’s Economic Security globally, which lays out a vision in which women and girls around the world, in all their diversity, are able to fully, meaningfully, and equally contribute to, and benefit from, economic growth and global prosperity. Intersecting forms of discrimination significantly increase the negative impact on individuals in underserved communities, including communities of color, in the United States and around the world. Therefore, this Strategy addresses the impact of intersectional discrimination and bias based on race, gender, and other factors, including sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, and socioeconomic status.

Through this strategy, we aim to foster equal access to education, innovation, quality jobs, and decent work,¹ including through entrepreneurship, for women and girls around the world. We envision a world in which everyone has equitable opportunities for job placement, advancement, quality of life, and leadership. Pursuing this objective is both a moral and strategic imperative. Closing the gender gap in the global workforce could unleash an additional contribution of $5.3 trillion to global GDP,² increasing economic security and prosperity for all.

Economic security is largely understood as the ability to consistently meet essential needs for oneself and one’s family through quality jobs and dignified, decent work. It means having a stable income and/or enough resources to support an adequate standard of living now, for the foreseeable future, and during times of economic crises. It is a reality that women are far less likely to enjoy than men, and the reason underlying the need for this Global Strategy.

In the 2021 Gender Gap Report, the World Economic Forum estimated that it would take 267.6 years to close the gender economic opportunity gap.³ This is ten years longer than estimated in the 2020 report, revealing the still-unfolding and devastating toll the COVID-19 pandemic has had on women and girls. In addition, per the World Bank’s “Women, Business, and the Law 2022” report, in only 12 economies do women have equal legal economic standing with men.⁴ Many women and girls of legal working age face harmful, discriminatory social norms, biases, and structural and systemic barriers to economic entry and full and equitable participation and advancement. They disproportionately experience gender-based violence, online and in-person sexual harassment, and other forms of abuse and discrimination; they often face income, wealth, resource, and technological disparities; and experience limited or reduced access to education, finance, resources, caregiving, and job opportunities. Many women and girls globally face barriers to accessing quality healthcare services, and quality health services, particularly regarding sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Lack of access to quality SRH services, including family planning, can lead to unplanned pregnancies, school dropout, and limit women’s economic participation in the long-term, with negative effects on broader economic growth.^{5 6 7}

By increasing skills and educational attainment; ensuring equal opportunity to participate in the formal economy; fostering innovation and entrepreneurship; promoting health and wellbeing, including through the prevention of and response to gender-based violence; fostering peaceful, stable, and thriving communities; and encouraging vibrant and resilient economies, the U.S. Government’s goal is to improve women’s economic security and equal opportunity globally, advancing economic development and prosperity for all.

To realize this vision, we come together as U.S. Government Departments and Agencies with a mandate to help mitigate and overcome significant barriers to the full economic participation of women and girls globally and unleash the full economic potential of entire families, communities, and nations.

The United States Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security is nested under and implements the National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality (National Gender Strategy). This strategy provides high-level guidance to U.S. Government Departments and Agencies on priorities for advancing women’s economic security globally, among other priorities, while allowing flexibility to Departments and Agencies to determine how best to advance and strengthen their women’s economic security work. Specifically, it will inform U.S. foreign policy, international programming and development assistance, trade policy and promotion, private sector development, and other U.S. Government actions to further the global economic priorities outlined in the National Gender Strategy, including: improving economic security and accelerating economic growth; eliminating gender-based violence; protecting, improving, and expanding equitable access to public health services and health care, including sexual and reproductive health care; ensuring equal opportunity and equity in education; promoting gender equity in mitigating and responding to climate change; and closing gender gaps in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Just as in the National Gender Strategy, we recognize the objectives within this Strategy are inherently linked and must be addressed in concert to achieve our vision for women’s economic security globally. Likewise, this Strategy will mutually reinforce several other whole-of-government initiatives and strategies and aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Context

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected women, resulting in a 4.2 percent drop in their employment between 2019 and 2020 versus a three percent drop in employment for men.⁸ According to the World Bank, the rate of work stoppage was seven percentage points higher for women than for men during the pandemic in 48 countries. The longer, historical view is even more sobering. Between 1990 and 2019, the global labor force participation rate for women remained stagnant at 50 percent compared to 80 percent for men despite gains in female education. In a recent policy briefing, the International Labor Organization (ILO) estimated that COVID-19 forced over two million women around the world to leave the workforce to meet unpaid caregiving needs brought about by the closure of schools and child care facilities, the confinement of older people, and the growing numbers of ill family members.⁹ Pandemic-related job losses particularly affected services sectors where women are disproportionately represented. School-aged girls withdrew from education to take on caregiving responsibilities for household members, which were not ameliorated as pandemic restrictions began to ease. Child, early, and forced marriage increased significantly, impacting the life course of millions of girls, as well as entire communities’ economic outcomes and wellbeing.¹⁰ UNESCO estimates that 11 million girls, whose schooling was disrupted by the pandemic, may never return to school. Women suffered business closures as COVID-19 increased reliance on digital technologies – with women facing greater challenges than men in accessing financing and digital technologies given longstanding financial and digital gender divides. At the same time, women were often on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response in their households and communities, playing essential roles as health and care workers to keep their families and economies operating. Violence and abuse against health and care workers, organizers, and advocates, which are roles disproportionately filled by women and girls, increased physically and in digital spaces.

Climate change is one of the greatest existential threats of our time, and women and girls, particularly those dependent on agriculture and related industries and those living along low-lying and coastal areas and on small islands, are disproportionately affected by the adverse impacts of climate change, environmental degradation, and natural disasters. Women and girls around the world experience the disproportionate impacts of external shocks and stressors, including climate change, conflict, crises, and epidemics and pandemics including but not limited to COVID-19. This is often exacerbated by overlapping and intersectional forms of discrimination as mentioned above and further elaborated in our guiding principles. They are also at a greater risk of losing jobs and productive assets during and in the aftermath of disasters.

Conflict and crises amplify existing gender inequalities, protection risks, and other vulnerabilities for women and girls. These disparities can lead to increased gender-based violence, negative coping strategies (such as child, early, and forced marriage or selective feeding practices), and compromised access to support, assistance, and resources for women and girls. Understanding the underlying inequities that make certain groups more vulnerable to shocks and stressors and elevating their meaningful participation in decision making are essential for both emergency and humanitarian response efforts, as well as long-term development.

Women and girls are overrepresented in displaced populations; they can be subject to heinous physical and sexual violence and abuse, and other forms of gender-based violence used as weapons of war in conflict and are disproportionately the victims of human trafficking and child, early, and forced marriages. Access to legal documentation, quality education and job skills training, and decent work, as well as financial, social, and psychological support, can all serve as critical forms of assistance in helping women and girls thrive in the face of threats of gender-based violence and other structural barriers to economic integration.

Crises, including mass migration, disproportionately affect women and girls, many of whom migrate to escape natural disasters, instability, and violence in their countries of origin. They are often at risk of human trafficking, exploitation, violence, and abuse, in part due to economic hardship and marginalization, including being the sole-provider for their families and in response to gender-based discrimination or limited access to education or economic opportunity in their communities of origin. Economic shocks caused by conflicts and crises disproportionately affect women and girls, including by increasing poverty, contributing to deteriorating working conditions, worsening unemployment and income-generating opportunities, reducing productive assets, and eroding social integration and social protections. Furthermore, economic insecurity can be a root cause of irregular migration.

Economic security can assist in addressing some root causes of conflict, crisis, and instability. A country’s female workforce has the potential to contribute significantly to its GDP, human security, and sustainable peace. Women’s economic participation plays a critical role in addressing power imbalances that perpetuate fragility, conflict, and violent extremism. Case studies have demonstrated when women can meaningfully participate in political processes, peace processes, and public life, they are able to advocate for the economic security of their entire community.¹¹

Strategy Overview

Women and girls are innovators, agents of change, and leaders in their families and communities. The U.S. Government set out to develop this Strategy to support women and girls around the world in their efforts to mitigate and overcome myriad challenges, become economically secure, and have the ability to fully and equitably contribute to and benefit from global prosperity, regardless of their race, color, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics. When we advance women’s economic security and ensure equal opportunity, we advance economic development and prosperity for all.

As part of the development of this Strategy, the U.S. Government, consulting with more than 200 civil society actors and external stakeholders across more than 30 countries, identified four key lines of effort through which U.S. efforts should focus:

• Promote Economic Competitiveness and Reduce Wage Gaps through Well-Paying, Quality Jobs
• Advance Care Infrastructure and Value Domestic Work
• Promote Entrepreneurship and Financial and Digital Inclusion, including through Trade and Investment; and
• Dismantle Systemic Barriers to Women’s Equitable Participation in the Economy

Across our consultations, we also identified four key mechanisms for how we will implement the Strategy:

• Diplomatic outreach, ensuring our bilateral and multilateral dialogues and diplomatic engagements promote women’s economic security globally.
• Partnerships with external stakeholders, including local organizations and labor organizations around the world, and the private sector, and, where appropriate, we will encourage support – both financial and technical – from the international community and multilateral development banks and development finance institutions.
• Continued engagement and consultation, including with existing partners such as labor organizations, civil society, academia, think tanks, the private sector, councils, associations, coalitions, alliances, collaboratives, and other community-based and women-led organizations, as well as religious and tribal community leaders, LGBTQI+ persons, in-laws, elders, men, and boys. We will also continue to engage in a wide array of consultations and collaboration across U.S. Government Agencies, Departments, and Congress.
• Relying on data-informed measurement and engaging monitoring and evaluation (M&E) and learning techniques.

Next Steps: Within six months of the release of the strategy, U.S. Government Departments and Agencies will formulate individual action plans that draw on our relevant strengths in this interdisciplinary approach. The U.S. Government will regularly report on the implementation of this Strategy.

As noted in the National Gender Strategy, advancing women’s economic security globally will require a shift away from social and gender norms and biases that undermine gender equity and equality. It will require addressing occupational segregation by appropriately valuing work

traditionally and disproportionately carried out by women and girls. This also means providing women and girls of legal working age with equal access to the decent, dignified work that is traditionally and disproportionately carried out by men and boys of working age. It will require the development, implementation, and enforcement of equitable and just laws, regulations, and policies; support for significant work already underway around the world by women’s organizations in support of these objectives; and investment in education and training, improved access to markets, finance, networks, and digital technologies, a commitment to social and labor protections, and collaboration across a broad array of partners and stakeholders.

We reiterate our commitment to U.S. leadership on women’s economic security on the world stage. Recent conflicts and crises around the world have demonstrated, once again, that times of acute instability and authoritarian resurgence reflect and exacerbate gender inequality and that full and equitable participation is critical to meeting the global challenges we face. As described previously, these global challenges that require women’s input but threaten women’s economic participation include, but are not limited to, the climate crisis and COVID-19 pandemic.

In this context, the first-ever U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security is guided by the following principles:

Interagency Implementation

In support of the National Gender Strategy, this U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security will provide a roadmap for U.S. Government efforts designed to advance women’s economic security around the world. Responsibility for realizing this ambitious White House vision will draw from and call on the expertise of several U.S. Government Departments and Agencies engaging in interventions, activities, and programs supporting women’s economic security around the globe.

We will elevate gender equity and equality in strategic planning and budgeting, policy development, management and training, bilateral and multilateral engagements, and programming and investment decisions, as well as M&E efforts. We will also strengthen gender-disaggregated (the gender identity as self-identified by an individual) and sex-disaggregated (as biologically defined) data collection, sharing, and analysis to inform evidence-based policy and decision-making and take steps to promote transparency and accountability for progress toward the goals laid out in this Strategy.

This work, in support of the National Gender Strategy, will be conducted in consultation with Congress, foreign governments, multi-lateral organizations, non-governmental actors — including faith-based groups, civil society, academia and think tanks, and the private sector — who were also consulted in the development of the Strategy and have essential roles to play in its implementation and sustainability.

Intersectional Approach

This U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security, as a component of the National Gender Strategy, is aligned with the guiding principles laid out in that Strategy and is a part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s efforts to ensure that all people are treated fairly and equitably and can reach their full potential. It aims to address intersecting forms of discrimination and advance equity and equality.

This approach reflects a commitment to address gender broadly. Our work is deeply motivated by a commitment to women and girls, considering longstanding systemic discrimination, power imbalances, and barriers that continue to affect their full economic participation and access to opportunity. To achieve this, we must also combat discrimination and harmful gender norms that affect all people: women and girls, including transgender women and girls, gender nonbinary and gender nonconforming people, as well as men and boys.

The Strategy also addresses the impact of intersectional discrimination and bias based on race, gender, and other factors, including sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, and socioeconomic status. Intersecting forms of discrimination significantly increase the negative impact on individuals in underserved and minority communities. For example, transgender women who are members of minority racial groups can face dual racial discrimination and transphobia, which often results in pervasively high rates of violence and denial of economic opportunity. Girls and young women also face multiple, intersecting forms of marginalization due to their age, gender, and other diverse identities. This often makes them less likely to complete their education and more at risk of experiencing gender-based violence, including child, early, and forced marriage, and limiting their future economic opportunities and earning potential.

In each of the priority lines of effort identified below, policies, programs and approaches will be informed by the historical and current context of these overlapping and cumulative burdens.

Interconnected Priorities

In our efforts to advance women’s economic security globally, we will focus on four lines of effort: (1) promoting economic competitiveness through well-paying, quality jobs and decent work that promotes dignity; (2) advancing care infrastructure and valuing domestic work; (3) promoting innovation, entrepreneurship and financial and digital inclusion, including through trade and investment; and (4) dismantling structural and systemic barriers to women’s participation in the economy.

We recognize that these four priorities are interconnected and often interdependent. Improving access to quality education and skills building will increase women and working-aged girls’ economic competitiveness and will also help to develop human capital across industries, such as the financial sector, technology sector, care economy, and agricultural and food systems. We will increase women’s ability to access markets and financial tools and help to break through systemic barriers to women’s full and equitable economic participation.

Gender-based violence, including sexual harassment and abuse, both online and offline, hampers educational outcomes and attendance and deters economic and livelihood participation, job retention, and opportunities for advancement and leadership for women around the globe and influences their health and well-being, and that of survivors and their families. Restrictions and inaccessibility to health care, including sexual and reproductive health services and public health services, undermine women’s rights, their ability to take care of themselves and their families, advance in the workplace, and lead in all sectors.

Our strategic objectives are inherently linked and must be addressed in concert to achieve our vision for achieving and sustaining women’s economic security globally.

Evidence-Based, Data-Informed Policy Development, Decision-Making, and Programming

U.S. Government Departments and Agencies are committed to evidence-based, data-informed policy development, decision-making, and programming. We will use data and analytical information to better inform the development of policy and programming recommendations, decisions, and implementation. We understand that significant gaps exist in relation to gender- and sex-disaggregated data, as well as data on issues that disproportionately affect women and girls, such as unpaid care work. We endeavor to strengthen our collection and use of sex-disaggregated data as a routine practice across all data collection efforts. We aspire to improve our collection of data disaggregated by gender identity in contexts when it is deemed safe and appropriate. This will allow for more robust and inclusive data to inform programmatic and policy decision-making. We will work to close those gaps in partnership with multilateral organizations, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank, to develop data and metrics to help identify potential trends and assess the impact of our interventions when possible.

We will focus on evidence-based decision-making to improve program performance by applying existing evidence about what works, generating new knowledge, and using experimentation and innovation to test new approaches to program delivery. This includes using existing data generated by U.S. Government Departments and Agencies as well as employing monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) principles to evaluate ongoing programming and deploying iterative and adaptive learning models.

We note that evidence-based, data-informed policy formulation, decision-making, and programming benefit from outside partnerships and collaboration with civil society, the private sector, and academia. To provide the best policy decisions and implementation of sustainable, impactful programming, we will endeavor to assist countries and private sector partners to develop gender- and sex-disaggregated data streams and fully utilize the existing data and knowledge available.

Locally Led Partnerships, Public/Private Partnerships, and Alignment with Other U.S. Strategies and Initiatives

To help implement the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security, we will seek partnerships within the U.S. government, with foreign governments, through multilateral organizations, and with non-government entities including the private sector and local partners. This will include both new and existing col

lessons learned, leverage funding, foster progress on women’s economic security, and identify areas for coordination, expansion, and inclusion of new actors. We will focus on an inclusive approach that engages diverse, women-led organizations and associations and engages men and boys to promote their advocacy and participation as gender equality champions.

Partnerships will build upon the extensive work that partners and U.S. Government Agencies and Departments individually and collectively are undertaking to advance gender equality and women’s economic security globally. Agencies and Departments consulted with diverse stakeholders, including representatives from the private sector, civil society, and foundations in the drafting of this Strategy, many of which enjoy existing relationships with the federal government and others interested in supporting the Administration’s goals as outlined in the National Gender Strategy to advance the economic security of women and girls in all their diversity.

Partnerships will seek to catalyze U.S. Government resources, collecting additional funding, in-kind contributions, and non-monetary resources from the international and local private sector, corporate foundations, civil society, academic institutions, governments, and multilateral institutions to advance the four lines of effort previously mentioned.

This Strategy does not exist in a policy vacuum. It will mutually reinforce several other whole-of-government initiatives and strategies, which include the U.S. Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security; the U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally; the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act of 2018,¹² Foreign Policy for the Middle Class; the U.S. Global Food Security Strategy; the U.S. Global Water Strategy; the President’s Trade Policy Agenda; the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience; the Presidential Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons; and the National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking, as well as Agency-specific strategies and laws such as the Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act of 2018 and various Agencies’ Climate Strategies, which include support for increasing women’s economic participation in the energy sector. The Strategy will also align with U.S. government efforts and activities supporting regional initiatives such as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), the Americas Partnership for Economic Prosperity (APEP), and others. Efforts to target conflict and crisis-related challenges will be addressed through our women’s economic security efforts in alignment with our work under the Women, Peace, and Security Action Plan and the Global Fragility Act.

The Strategy will leverage and inform the U.S. implementation of the G7 Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) and its focus on collaborating with a wide variety of partners on gender equality and equity investments.

At the 2022 G7 Leaders’ Summit, President Biden and G7 Leaders formally launched PGII, a $600 billion values-driven partnership to meet the enormous infrastructure needs of low- and middle-income countries. PGII is designed to fill the global infrastructure gap while advancing high standards and delivering sustainable infrastructure that makes a difference in people’s lives around the world, creates good jobs, both at home and abroad, strengthens and diversifies our supply chains, and advances inclusive growth across all priorities.

PGII will drive investments in four priority pillars that will be especially critical for robust development in the coming decades: climate and energy security, digital connectivity, health and health security, and gender equality and equity, as well as the transportation infrastructure—like ports or railroads—that supports their impacts.

PGII will also focus on addressing the conditions that prevent private sector investment in these emerging markets, including by working to de-risk investments to drive capital towards markets and newer technologies with financing gaps, and advancing reforms with multilateral development banks to implement new approaches to more effectively leverage private capital. PGII will be a true partnership with host countries, who will lead the way in shaping projects that meet their needs; and a true partnership with the wide variety of partners, from other governments to the private sector, who will be crucial to making these investments transformative.

The Global U.S. Women’s Economic Security Strategy aligns with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including those dedicated to gender equality and equity (SDG 5), poverty reduction (SDG 1), access to education (SDG 4), health and well-being (SDG 3), climate change (SDG 13), decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), promoting just, peaceful, and inclusive societies (SDG 16) and several more. It aligns with President Biden’s Summit for Democracy goals and commitments as well as U.S. commitments pledged within the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the G7, the G20, the OECD, the United Nations Generation Equity Forum (GEF), and other multilateral fora.

Accountability, Learning, and Adaptation

Complementary to our evidence-based and data-informed approach is our commitment to hold ourselves accountable by adapting according to knowledge and learning generated from programs and policies supporting women’s economic security. We will use an annual reporting schedule aligned with the National Gender Strategy and other U.S. Strategies as an opportunity to reflect on our collective and individual Agency and Departmental progress and adapt our strategic approach accordingly.

Within our programming, we commit, to the extent possible, to adaptive management, in order to be more responsive to our operating environments and adapt to contextual changes that may arise. We will collaborate to ensure interventions across different Departments and Agencies are complementary and benefit from learnings to enable iteration and adaptation.

Throughout the year, we will continue to lead and coordinate our work through existing Agency authorities, mandates, and interagency processes such as the Principals’ Committees, Deputies’ Committees, Interagency Policy Committees (IPC), Trade Policy Committee, Trade Policy Review Group, the Trade Policy Staff Committee,¹³ Trade Promotion Coordinating Committee,¹⁴ and others, implementing our activities under these and other existing statutory authorities and processes to manage workstreams, engagement, and advancement of the principles, goals, actions, and progress under this Strategy.

A Commitment to the Do No Harm Principle and Safeguarding and Protection Against Sexual Exploitation and Abuse

We recognize that efforts to promote gender equity and equality are essential to building stronger, more productive, and resilient communities, but can create unintended consequences, particularly for the most vulnerable. In our endeavors to achieve the vision of the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security, we commit to analyzing and working to mitigate the potential risks for all participants, so that the voices of groups that have been historically marginalized or made vulnerable are heard to understand their needs and priorities to do no harm. This is particularly true in fragile and conflict affected settings, where interventions can inadvertently exacerbate existing tensions or discrimination. We hold ourselves and all partners working to implement the Strategy accountable to all affected communities, businesses, and especially those populations most at risk.

One of the greatest challenges to the Do No Harm principle¹⁵ is the reality of persistent sexual exploitation and abuse. We commit to strengthening our own safeguards and accountability mechanisms for the prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse (PSEA), as well as those of our partners. We join together as the U.S. Government, in partnership with other partner governments and multilateral fora, to end sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) in relation to government awards and policies by developing and adhering to a minimum set of organization-wide policies and internal controls¹⁶ necessary to reasonably prevent, detect, address, and resolve incidents of SEA. We advocate renewed efforts to strengthen SEA prevention and response, including promoting risk mitigation measures, guaranteeing survivor-centered response actions, and prioritizing SEA prevention and response staffing and resourcing. We endeavor to enhance PSEA efforts using the ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’ principle¹⁷, which is reflected in the Strategy and its implementation through consultations with civil society and key stakeholders.

Promoting Economic Competitiveness through Well-Paying, Quality Jobs

Our vision is to promote economic competitiveness through gender equality and women having access to well-paying, quality jobs and decent work¹⁸ to close the wage gap, promote dignity, foster inclusive, vibrant, and growing economies, and promote more stable and prosperous societies globally.

We believe that if all women can access employment in all economic sectors, including traditionally male dominated sectors such as construction, transportation, fisheries, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); if women can access employment that is both in line with international labor standards and free from gender-based violence, including harassment; and if women receive adequate training, support, and opportunities for advancement in such work, then women and girls globally will achieve economic competitiveness through well-paying, quality jobs and decent and dignified work.

Goals: Supporting the National Strategy for Gender Equity and Equality and aligning with the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security encourages U.S. Government Departments and Agencies to support policies and programs that promote women’s access to well-paying, quality jobs and decent work opportunities that promote dignity. To achieve this, we will promote women’s economic security, including through bilateral and multilateral diplomacy and foreign assistance, with a focus on (a) improving access to quality education, vocational training, and technical and soft skills to ensure women and girls of working-age have the capabilities and resources needed to participate and thrive in the economy; (b) advocating decent work, strong social and labor protections, and diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility required to support access to and retention in quality, well-paying jobs and decent work; (c) promoting professional development and leadership opportunities to help women compete, be promoted into management and leadership positions, including at the highest levels, and otherwise succeed in the workplace; and (d) promoting access to tools and financial resources to help women become innovators and entrepreneurs.

Our Strategy

a. Improving Access to Education and Skills Building

Women and girls of legal working-age face gender-based barriers to finding quality, well-paying jobs due to limited access to quality, affordable education, including continuing education, technical skills training, and upskilling that would adequately prepare them for decent work.

We will encourage expanding access to quality early education for young girls, ensuring that young and working women can progress along a career pathway with foundational, technical, workplace, entrepreneurial, STEM education, and digital literacy and skills training, especially in support of integration and reintegration into the workforce. Across these efforts, we will seek to increase women’s and girls’ skills to compete, succeed, and thrive in an economy and society that are increasingly digital and moving towards greener, more sustainable practices.

Women also experience a lack of pathways from education or training into the workforce and subsequent opportunities for promotion. Furthermore, women and girls often have limited access to tertiary and specialized professional education, which can be exacerbated by gender-based violence, including child, early, and forced marriages and unions, adolescent and/or unplanned pregnancy, and harmful social and gender norms. This results in limited skills or qualification for jobs in emerging and more lucrative sectors, including STEM fields. For those who can access higher education, there is often a mismatch between the skills offered in higher education institutions and those in demand in local economies. Finally, unnecessary educational degree requirements for open jobs needlessly disadvantage women and girls in the pursuit of good jobs, even when they have the skills and knowledge employers need. Such practices do not value applicants based on existing knowledge and ability.

These barriers continue to increase. As the climate crisis threatens the availability of natural resources, women and girls will spend increasing amounts of time procuring or maintaining these threatened natural resources, while losing access to education and economic opportunities. Poor access to infrastructure, such as affordable clean energy and water, increases time spent on performing unpaid care work by women and girls, which results in fewer hours for educational or economic engagement,¹⁹ and underscores the need to improve climate change-resilient infrastructure. We will therefore advocate for the improvement of access to potable water, electricity, transportation, housing, and sanitation to reduce unpaid care work and to mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis on increasing care work for women and girls. We will also work to ensure climate finance is gender-responsive and invests in such infrastructure.

Women are also frequently held back by a lack of resources and funding for innovation and entrepreneurship as well as a lack of tools or knowledge of digital skills and technology, which impedes their participation in e-commerce and other livelihood generation opportunities specific to local markets and expanding supply chains. These skills are critical for economic security, including skills especially in demand since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Globally, women lack access to business and professional networks, sponsors, and mentors,²⁰ and, as a result, often experience barriers and lack opportunities for gainful employment and to learn about starting and expanding a business. Women are also disadvantaged because they rarely receive adequate training on their rights as workers.

U.S. government Departments and Agencies will address these challenges and barriers by working to promote quality education accessible to all, and incentivizing governments and families to improve girls’ access to school and improve retention, including flexibility for pregnant and adolescent girls with caregiving responsibilities. Application of these efforts include addressing skills gaps, including digital literacy and skills, information literacy and worker rights awareness, and business training and mentoring for women. As such, we will work to close gender-based skills gaps by promoting lifelong learning policies and gender-responsive skills development, identifying and developing male allies and advocates, encouraging both government-enabled and private sector-led industry skills development programs and hiring practices, including reskilling and vocational education in STEM, green and blue jobs, and other higher-paying fields. Increased digital skills and literacy will support inclusion in an increasingly digital economy and society, which will open employment opportunities for women and girls of working-age and create resilience. We will continue to foster educational and cultural exchange programs and monitor opportunities to sponsor grants to local organizations that provide experiential learning opportunities that can connect young women with like-minded peers and successful role models in STEM, climate, and medical fields. Through PGII, we will also finance projects to address specific infrastructure barriers that disproportionately affect women and girls’ time use and access to these skills building opportunities – such as investing in care infrastructure or improving water and sanitation access.

To promote women’s access to and participation in the global labor market, we will encourage mentoring opportunities, and training to develop market-driven skills, improving job qualifications. Additionally, we will promote skills-based hiring practices. Hiring has historically relied on education as a proxy for a candidate’s ability to perform in a job. A skills-based hiring approach helps employers recognize and value applicant skills regardless of where they were acquired, whether in a formal degree program, on the job, through programs like registered apprenticeships, or on one’s own. We will also emphasize connecting women to employment opportunities through job placement programs and paid internships to enable women and girls of legal working-age to gain the experience and expertise in key sectors needed for increased entry into and retention in the workforce. This includes capacity-building and direct service programs that enable re-entry for women who have left the workplace for various reasons, including discrimination, societal norms, and a lack of access to quality education and childcare.

We will encourage and support the collection and dissemination of career path information, including sector earnings, in-demand occupations, and other relevant information to help shift unconscious biases and to cultivate women and girls’ interest in seeking education and training in decent, higher-value work that is often traditionally and disproportionately carried out by men and boys.

b. Advancing Workplace Rights and Protections, Eliminating Discrimination, and Ensuring Equitable Workplaces

Around the world, women and girls of legal working age face numerous obstacles to well-paying, quality employment and decent work. Many women work in the informal economy and low-wage occupations, frequently in care work without access to social protections²¹ that are needed to provide income support during economic downturns and crises. Many work in unsafe conditions without the protection of internationally recognized labor rights, including the rights to form and join trade unions and bargain collectively, and are subjected to discrimination and gender-based violence, including harassment. Through the global #MeToo movement, women and girls in all their diversity have generated a renewed global recognition of how widespread and normalized sexual harassment and assault is in the workplace. Access to higher-wage, high-growth fields, including in STEM and innovation, including entrepreneurship opportunities, can be out-of-reach for many women due to numerous factors, including discrimination; the absence of policies or safeguards to support diversity, equity, and inclusion; poor access to quality training; funding biases; and a lack of labor rights protection.

In response to these challenges, the U.S. government will promote internationally recognized labor rights, including in global supply chains, and implement this Strategy based on worker engagement and the ILO Decent Work Agenda.

The Biden-Harris Administration’s inclusive, worker-centered trade policy prioritizes worker rights and good jobs that are accessible to women, as reflected in the President’s Trade Policy Agenda and Annual Report.

Contributing to this Strategy, but working through PGII, we will look at ways to ensure infrastructure projects increase opportunities for women’s labor force participation and income. We will identify PGII projects that include a gender analysis and advance women’s economic security such as improved electricity supply, which helps decrease the time women spend on manual household chores and enables entrepreneurship; well-designed transportation systems that can increase women’s safety and access to jobs; and technology improvements that facilitate women’s access to online-based work and expand economic potential.

We will advocate for policies and programs through technical assistance, multilateral and bilateral engagement, and trade policy to promote gender equity and equality and women’s economic security by strengthening respect for women’s internationally recognized labor rights,²² including the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining. Women who can exercise their labor rights to organize trade unions and bargain collectively with their employers can address the power imbalances and discriminatory societal norms that hinder economic security. Labor unions provide benefits for their members, including better and more equal pay and increased protections from harassment and discrimination. We will support women, including women in the informal economy, migrant workers, women workers with disabilities, and racial and ethnic minority women, to join and lead labor unions to strengthen their worker rights and voices.

Strengthening women’s access to social protections, such as women’s health services, unemployment benefits, retirement and pension benefits, sick leave, and other social assistance services, is vital for women’s economic security – particularly for women working in the informal economy and especially during crises. We will also seek to advance women’s ability to be free from violence and harassment at work and encourage governments, civil society, and the private sector to implement strategies to prevent and address occupational hazards, including violence and harassment and prevent exposure to injury and illness at work. We will encourage the incorporation of core tenets of relevant ILO instruments, including ILO Convention 189 ²³ on domestic workers and ILO Convention 190 ²⁴ on violence and harassment as well as labor standards and guidance related to the COVID-19 pandemic into international assistance programming, strategies, policies, and action plans, including U.S. investments through international financial institutions, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, and activities supported by the United States Government.

Building support systems and digital and in-person networking opportunities for women, particularly those who face multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination, will be an important part of our Strategy. We will work to strengthen women’s voices through networks and collective action, including through supporting the right of employees to organize and women’s leadership in unions. We will support coalitions of all organizations and companies promoting gender equity and equality and women’s economic empowerment in their operations and supply chains, and particularly women business owners and workers who are advocating for democratic and economic reforms.

We will work to combat the gender wage gap, including by supporting the Equal Pay International Coalition,²⁵ led by the ILO, UN Women, and the OECD, and encourage transparency and equity in wages, promotion, recruitment, retention, employment; ensuring effective measurement of wage gaps; and promoting transparency in hiring, promotion, employment, and performance measurement.

Departments and Agencies will advocate for addressing discrimination and promoting gender equality, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) policies, mechanisms for compliance and transparency in civil society and the public and private sectors through financial and non-financial resources, legislation, policies, methodologies, and responsible business practices. This includes promoting diversity and equity in staffing, union, and leadership positions for women; promoting equitable pay, benefits, and access to social protections; and promoting parental leave, access to affordable and high-quality child care, and flexibility for working caregivers including through flexible work policies. We will encourage the strengthening of recruitment processes to encourage inclusion; eliminate discrimination; support the development of awareness campaigns about the challenges women employees face, and the rights they have; and highlight the need for gender-responsive employer policies, practices, and protections. And we will promote the business case for diverse and inclusive companies and support those who seek investments to increase their knowledge of gender-transformative employer policies and practices, provide financial support for technical assistance and capacity-building, and work with investees on how to aim for and measure true impact.

An important contributor to women’s meaningful economic participation is a woman’s ability to determine whether, when, and how to have a family and her access to public health and health care services within a sound and functioning health care infrastructure. As part of the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security, we will address sexual and reproductive health needs, including family planning, support for breastfeeding at work, as well as menstrual hygiene and menopause management and the provision of appropriate health and hygiene infrastructure in the workplace. We will encourage governments and the private sector to provide affordable health care and health insurance to allow women, in all their diversity, to confidently pursue wage employment and/or entrepreneurship.

We will also encourage the private sector to employ a variety of workplace strategies to promote women’s employment and entrepreneurship networks, including identifying colleagues and mentors in the workplace who are champions of gender equity and equality and women’s economic empowerment, partnering with feminist and women’s groups, and creating workplace norms and culture where individuals are empowered to speak out against discriminatory and harmful workplace behaviors and are protected from retaliation for doing so.

Aligned with the Global U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence, we will proactively integrate prevention, mitigation, and response to gender-based violence in the household, workplace, and society across U.S. foreign policy and assistance efforts, recognizing that gender-based violence is a global and material systemic risk to economic security, democracy, and development.

c. Promoting Professional Development, Entrepreneurial, and Leadership Opportunities

Research has documented that working conditions can be inhospitable to women’s promotion and success, often leading them to prematurely exit the workforce, including in patent-intensive fields, without realizing their patenting potential.²⁶ Exclusion from professional networks, lack of mentoring, and discrimination drive women to leave their jobs while poor access to care infrastructure can contribute to persistently lower inventor rates among women.²⁷

We will advocate for practices that require employers of all sizes to report on efforts to mentor, employ, and provide networking and advancement opportunities for women across a diverse range of industries, and to provide proper and safe workplaces for working parents and caregivers, such as nursing rooms and child care benefits. Aligned with our work through PGII, we will advance women’s participation in decent work and as entrepreneurs, leaders, innovators, and decision makers in emerging and developing market private sector businesses, including in industries transitioning to greener practices and responding to the climate crisis. Through entrepreneurship training, mentoring, and networking programs, we will empower women with the knowledge, skills, networks, and access to markets and finance that they need to plan, launch, and scale businesses. We will also promote women’s entrepreneurship in competition for and awarding of contracts by sourcing to women-owned small and medium enterprises where appropriate. These efforts will promote women’s economic opportunities and ensure women and girls of legal working age have the skills, capabilities and resources needed to participate and excel in the economy.

We will work to ensure women have greater representation in workplace leadership, such as senior management teams and corporate governing boards; in decision-making and governance bodies, such as those relating to natural resource management, climate negotiations, agriculture and agribusiness, and discussions regarding resource ownership and governance; and we will look for ways to promote powerful female role models. This includes highlighting successful women from diverse sectors and backgrounds; recognizing women leaders, managers, employees, and entrepreneurs, and funding sustained, digitized opportunities for networking, mentorship, and leadership development. Sharing what works, best practices, and lessons learned from various countries, including our own, will provide opportunities for others and for us to learn, adopt, adapt, and scale similar efforts.

Measuring Success

Increased economic competitiveness through the promotion of well-paying, quality jobs and dignified, decent work can be measured through increased gender parity in wages across sectors, improved quality of employment and democratic worker representation, improved social and legal protections for women and girls of legal working age, including preventing and responding to gender-based violence in the household, workplace, and society, and greater overall adherence to international labor standards in all sectors and supply chains. To track the U.S. government’s contribution to these outcomes, we propose the following topline metrics:

Overall metrics and reporting practices in support of the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security can be found in the Metrics and Reporting section.

i. Job quality will be measured using the Better Work Compliance Assessment Tool. It assesses compliance with core international labor standards and national labor law. Job quality for the purposes of this indicator encompasses the following core international labor standards: Child labor; Discrimination; Forced Labor; Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining. Working conditions standards are drawn from each country’s national labor law. Areas assessed include: Compensation; Contract and Workplace Relations; Occupational Safety and Health; Working Time. For more information, see: https://betterwork.org/portfolio/better-works-global-compliance-assessment-tool/#1472163251185-701116e5-c8191365-52ab 
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Advancing Care Infrastructure and Valuing Domestic Work

Our vision is to advance quality and sustainable care infrastructure that is accessible to all, including women in all their diversity, to achieve three objectives:

• To advance protections for care workers and promote shifts towards greater gender equity in paid and unpaid care roles and responsibilities.
• To improve the quality of employment for those working in the care economy and promote economic security and stability for care workers, those utilizing care services, their families, and their communities.
• And to stimulate the creation of more affordable, quality, and accessible care options to enable women to participate equitably in paid employment and other economic activities.

Our mechanisms to achieve this will include strengthening linkages between public and private sector actors to make the necessary investments; advocating for proper remuneration and protection of care workers and ensuring care responsibilities are equitably shared by people of all genders; and the adoption of protocols and robust pathways for workforce re-entry.

Goals: In support of the National Gender Strategy and aligning with PGII objectives, we will promote decent work in the care sector and improved care infrastructure globally through bilateral and multilateral diplomacy and foreign assistance, with a focus on (a) promoting investments in care infrastructure; (b) advocating for social and legal protections and improved working conditions for the care workforce; (c) strengthening women’s voices through education, advocacy, and collective action; and (d) addressing discriminatory and harmful social norms and gender-based violence.

Our Strategy

As noted in the National Gender Strategy the United States will join with global allies to strengthen care infrastructure worldwide to lift millions of women and families out of poverty. We will leverage our role in multilateral economic institutions to promote government and private sector investment in care, including child, elder, and health care, and quality early childhood education, as well as support programs that expand access to and availability of quality care. We will work to support protections for the caregiving workforce—including not only workers in health, child, elder, and other social care, but also domestic workers, who are often from the most marginalized communities, and often migrants either from rural to urban areas within countries or across borders—to ensure they are adequately paid a living wage and protected under labor laws. We will promote reforms that serve communities and families, including workers in the informal economy, whose economic and caregiving needs are too often overlooked in existing care infrastructure.

Expectations that women and girls will shoulder the responsibility for paid and unpaid care fuel discrimination against women and girls and create barriers to women’s full and equitable participation in labor markets and in economic activity generally. Thus, improvements in global care infrastructure are essential to advance economic security for women and their families, globally. Around the world, even before the COVID-19 pandemic, women were responsible for nearly three-quarters of unpaid care work²⁸ on average, undermining their ability to participate in paid economic activity. Women and girls also make up the vast majority of workers in the paid care economy, work that is often low-wage and informal in nature. Care workers often lack access to social protections, job benefits, and labor protections and are at a higher risk of gender-based violence and harassment. In many countries around the world, young girls are removed from schools and called upon to assume caregiving responsibilities for siblings, older persons, and relatives with disabilities in support of working parents.

Demand for accessible, quality, affordable care is already high and rising in many places, and in certain geographies, there has been a longstanding deficit of care options, reinforcing a perpetuation of gender norms that constrain women to unpaid caregiver roles. Even before the pandemic, more than one in six adult women were serving as unpaid elder care providers. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated care infrastructure weaknesses around the globe. In particular, the pandemic disproportionately affected millions of women who lost or were forced to leave their jobs or income generating activities to care for children as schools closed, care for family members with disabilities, survivors of conflict, trauma, and gender-based violence, or needed to care for older adults. Globally, women comprise only 39 percent of the formal labor force but represented well over half of pandemic-related job losses around the world.

To address these challenges, we will focus on:

a. Investing in Care Infrastructure

Worldwide there is insufficient public investment in the care economy, which has often been an unregulated, unpaid, and/or underpaid sector. As a result, many families are faced with both prohibitive child care and caretaking costs and a lack of availability of quality care options outside the home. While external care options may lessen the care burden on women, they can be prohibitively costly, often inaccessible (particularly in rural areas and among women who are self-employed), and not always culturally acceptable. There is also limited investment in early childhood education in low- and middle-income countries, increasing expectations for women to provide additional care and educational responsibilities.

Expanding access to quality child care has the potential to yield multi-generational impacts by improving women’s employment, productivity, and well-being, as well as child health and education outcomes, family welfare, business productivity, and overall economic growth. However, too many families worldwide lack suitable child care options, restricting women’s employment opportunities, productivity, and income, which also reduces women’s empowerment and well-being, leaving many children in unsafe and unstimulating environments. To address this, under PGII, the U.S. government has partnered with the World Bank and is leading diplomatic engagements to encourage partnerships in the recently launched global Invest in Childcare initiative, housed at the World Bank, which will expand access to quality child care and early learning programs globally.²⁹ We are highlighting and will continue to lead this important effort in multilateral fora such as the G7, G20, OECD, APEC, and others.

We will also advocate for greater private sector and public investment and encourage partnerships and support for enhanced care options around the globe, resulting in economically sustainable growth of the care industry. To assist with this, we will support and encourage multilateral organizations in the collection of gender- and sex-disaggregated data to document the business case for investments in the care economy and to inform our international engagements.

We will work to ensure that COVID-19 response and recovery foreign assistance programs are gender-responsive and address the disproportionate burdens of unpaid care and amplified negative economic and social impacts of COVID-19 on women and girls.

We will encourage the development of quality, accessible, and affordable care options outside the home, with appropriate protection and oversight and sensitivity to cultural and social norms. Recognizing that external care is not always culturally appropriate, where it is appropriate, we will work to ensure child protections and a strong regulatory environment.

b. Advocating Social and Legal Protections and Improved Working Conditions

We will promote and support decent work through legislation, policies, and practices, such as utilizing the ILO’s five-Rs approach as a framework – recognize, reduce, and redistribute unpaid care work, reward decent work and care workers, and promote representation in leadership and collective bargaining – and work to strengthen social and legal protections, drawing on international frameworks, such as ILO Conventions 189 and 190.

Focusing on laws and policies that cover parental leave, flexible work arrangements, support services for care takers and for workers seeking help in instances of labor abuse, adequate wages, and benefits; laws relating to divorce, inheritance and land ownership; access to sexual and reproductive health services; and family tax credits, we will raise awareness of and encourage enforcement of governmental policies and laws that increase gender equality and women’s economic empowerment.³⁰ We will advocate for and encourage the adoption by governments of policies that promote decent work, encourage convening policy and program dialogues to facilitate peer-to-peer learning with other governments, and highlight effective models of care practices.

We will advocate flexible work arrangements, opportunities for virtual work and learning, access to care services, and access to mentors and sponsors. We will encourage recognition of and support for workplace policies that support employees with caregiving obligations, including flexible work arrangements and parental and caretaking leave for all, including men, women, and same-sex parents, and job protection for extended caretaking leave. And we will amplify data on positive impacts of flexible work-life balance programs, telework, and quality care options for working families.

We will encourage partnerships with both the public and private sectors and policies that spur innovation, such as tax incentives, improved credit rates, and cash-based incentives, to encourage governments, banks, and businesses to help transition care workers from the informal to the formal economy and ensure fair and equitable working conditions and adequate social protections.

We will partner with labor organizations and businesses to ensure the development of redress and accountability mechanisms for care and domestic workers, particularly those working informally (e.g., accountability councils, anonymous hotlines to report abuses, fines), coupled with systems and methodologies for employer compliance.

Bilaterally and multilaterally, we will encourage the development, adoption, and implementation of policies and interventions to support caregiving and unpaid care work, including paid family leave, cash for care programs, subsidies, provision of child care by employers or governments, flexible and predictable work arrangements and schedules, labor protections, and on-ramps for caregivers.

c. Strengthening Women’s Voices Through Education, Advocacy, and Collective Action

The lack of recognition of care and domestic work as a viable profession, combined with the devaluing of care work and workers globally, creates significant challenges and renders many care workers and their essential contributions invisible. Most care workers are women, frequently migrants and adolescent girls, and there is often a lack of supporting infrastructure in the household and the surrounding community to provide quality care services. Often relegated to the informal economy, care workers have limited bargaining power and lack the skills to negotiate, organize, define, and articulate their needs, and are not in spaces where policy and decision-making occur.

U.S. government Departments and Agencies will work to support local women’s organizations, care and domestic worker unions and organizations, and businesses that both provide quality care and advocate for host-country government support. We will support and help build capacity to advance care workers’ labor rights, including the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining so that these workers can advocate for vital protections at work, including adequate livable wages, acceptable work hours, workplace safety, and freedom from discrimination, violence, and harassment.

We will work to support social dialogue³¹ as stakeholders in these policy conversations, including by advancing representation for care workers in both formal and informal dialogue forums with the public and private sectors, so that women can advocate for policies that protect their own economic security and interests.

Recognizing that women often work in multiple sectors and seek jobs in the semi-formal economy, we will encourage local-led context-based solutions and incentives for formalization and complement these efforts by helping to create or expand labor and social protections in the informal sector. We will also encourage the implementation of standardized contracts and enforcement through compliance mechanisms for domestic and care workers to simplify formalizing work, increase transparency in the care and domestic workforce, and promote adherence to social and labor protections.

To strengthen and grow the care industry, we will work to improve access to quality education, vocational training, skills building, and certification for women and girls at all stages of their workforce development.

d. Preventing and Responding to Gender-Based Violence and Addressing Discriminatory and Harmful Social Norms

Discriminatory and harmful social norms, gender inequality, and power imbalances fuel gender-based violence and harassment and present significant challenges to advancing care infrastructure and valuing domestic work. As noted above, social norms and occupational segregation mean that paid and unpaid care work often falls to women. Care may also fall to girls who, as a result, either drop out of school early or do not attend school at all. Child, early, and forced marriage and unions and adolescent pregnancy may also result in early entry to care roles and may impede participation in education and formal employment opportunities. Care workers and those who work from their homes may face domestic violence that both impacts their ability to enjoy their rights and inhibits their economic participation, particularly if their place of employment lacks employer policies and regulations and/or when their employer is perpetrating violence. At the same time, in many places cultural and demographic changes have shifted child care from a community to a household responsibility, increasing the burden on women in the household. These practices are often magnified for persons experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination. In response, we will encourage adopting an explicit gender lens in both public and private investments to address unequal care burdens.

Advocating gender equity in caregiving and actively encouraging men and boys to value caregiving and adopt roles traditionally considered those of women and girls will feature prominently in our efforts. This includes encouraging men to share in the responsibilities of unpaid care and domestic work, valuing and monetizing unpaid work, encouraging the adoption, implementation, and use of paid parental leave, sharing caregiving responsibilities, and promoting education to shift gender stereotypes and social norms around caregiving.

We will advocate for the implementation of workplace campaigns that dismantle gender stereotypes and promote gender-balance³² in workplaces, encouraging leaders and workers to take on care activities, including by taking paternity leave, that can help shift workplace culture.

The increase in home-based and flexible telework alternatives during COVID-19 contributed to an increase in various forms of gender-based violence as financial and other stressors increased and survivors of intimate partner violence may have been trapped at home with their abusers. Experiences of gender-based violence in the home, in digital spaces, in the workplace, and while commuting cause social, physical, psychological and economic harm to women and their communities and can restrict women and other underrepresented populations from fully participating in the global economy. Aligned with the U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally, we will work to prevent, mitigate, and respond to gender-based violence including sexual harassment and technology-facilitated gender-based violence, especially in relation to care and domestic work and address the impacts of COVID-19 on the movement to end gender-based violence.

Measuring Success

We believe that advancing quality care infrastructure and valuing domestic work and the care economy will be achieved when we see increased public investment in care infrastructure, legal and social protections that include the needs of caregivers and care workers, and gender parity in time spent on unpaid care work. To track the U.S. government’s contribution to these outcomes, we propose the following topline metrics:

_{*Other Departments and Agencies will report as applicable.}

Overall metrics and reporting practices in support of the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security can be found in the Metrics and Reporting section.

Promoting Entrepreneurship and Financial and Digital Inclusion, Including Through Trade and Investment

Our vision is to promote women’s entrepreneurship and financial and digital literacy and inclusion, including through trade and investment, to support greater, more inclusive, and better-quality job creation and economic development to achieve a more resilient, innovative, stable, and prosperous global economy.

We believe that by improving women’s access to opportunities in and benefits from markets, finance, and digital technology, and enabling women to gain the knowledge and skills to access business opportunities, financial services and digital technologies, and to encourage the amplification of women entrepreneurs’ voices through business associations, unions, women-led organizations, and other worker voice or representative organizations, then women will benefit from more equitable opportunities to successfully start, grow, and contribute to businesses, benefit from increased knowledge and practice of worker rights, and be better equipped to compete in local, regional, and global markets.

Goals: To promote women’s entrepreneurship and innovation globally, we aspire to reduce gender discrimination in business and consumer lending; increase the collection and utilization of gender- and sex-disaggregated data; close persistent gender gaps in access to capital; catalyze investment in women-owned, -led, and -managed businesses, including micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs); and create and advance opportunities to more fully and equitably include women-owned and -led businesses in supply chains and contracting in local, regional, and global markets.

Our Strategy

a. Fostering an Enabling Environment and Improve Women’s Access to Markets,

Women’s ability to access markets, including financial markets, credit, capital, insurance, digital technologies, and networks, remains central to increasing women’s entrepreneurship, job creation, and their overall economic empowerment. Women around the world often face disproportionate difficulties gaining access to capital due to a lack of financial literacy and limited access to collateral due to limited or no rights to ownership of land or other physical property. On the supply side, there is a notable lack of women fund managers, women-led funds, and fund structures specifically suited for women and women-owned enterprises to start and grow their businesses. Those funds and fund managers that do exist are under-resourced with a lack of products and services designed to meet the needs of businesses, particularly MSMEs, where women are disproportionately represented. Women face limited access to the internet, mobile devices, and unequal use of shared digital products in the home, as well as barriers related to device and platform costs, such as data. Women also lack access to both physical and digital markets as well as e-commerce platforms. And women often lack the necessary digital skills training to be able to access digital platforms and establish and grow their business.

To foster an enabling environment, we will invest in women’s entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic inclusion through our foreign assistance and in partnership with the private sector, including through impact and commercial investment and capacity-building for women entrepreneurs. We will advocate greater opportunities for women workers, entrepreneurs, and consumers to participate in and benefit from trade and access to markets.

We will encourage the integration of a gender lens into financial, digital, and marketing products and services, as well as trade promotion and capacity building. This will include advocating for considerations on how decisions are made regarding these products and services to identify ways of supporting equitably the well-being of both women and men, taking special care to ensure the inclusion of women in all their diversity. We will also encourage greater transparency in the financial, technology, and venture capital sectors to track the proportion of investments in women-owned and -led businesses.

We will work to advance labor law reforms and enforcement and encourage the extension of labor law coverage to protect women workers in low-wage jobs and the informal economy, as well as to prevent human trafficking and domestic servitude.³³ This includes motivating both governments and corporations to increase transparency and, therefore, accountability. We will raise awareness about the importance of respecting worker rights and promoting decent, dignified work.

We will share best practices and provide information on tools to support entrepreneurship and innovation and encourage the use of public-private partnerships, where appropriate.

And we will work to increase the capacity of businesses, service providers, and women-owned and –led businesses to understand the benefits of and strategies for protecting the rights of workers employed by these businesses. Women who are creating new businesses are often at risk of turning to children in the household to support business start-up efforts, increasing the risk for child labor. Our work will build on research on effective avenues for preventing child labor and other labor rights violations in women’s entrepreneurship initiatives.

We will provide technical assistance in developing model policies for MSMEs and large businesses that address gender-based violence, including sexual harassment, and assist in implementing these policies.

To increase access to markets, we will encourage and support business growth strategies to assist women-owned MSMEs through e-commerce and marketing support, trade promotion programs, global supply chain capacity-building, market development, and the creation of market entry and expansion strategies.

We will create and advance opportunities to include more fully and equitably gender-balanced and women-owned and managed businesses in supply chains, and vendor contracting, encouraging programs that support opportunities for MSMEs, including those that aim to tackle global challenges and infrastructure development goals as aligned with our PGII investment priorities, in entrepreneurial, innovative ways. In this way, we will improve the livelihoods of women entrepreneurs and support their transition from the informal to the formal sector, if they so choose.

Collaborating with governments and businesses, we will recommend gender-responsive procurement policies to tackle barriers and challenges that prevent women-owned businesses from accessing and fully participating in local, regional, and global value chains, including food systems.³⁴ We will encourage governments that solicit procurement in information and communications technology (ICT) to encourage tendering practices that create opportunities for women-owned tech companies to compete equitably.

We will advocate that governments make available online relevant regulations for access to markets, including requirements for import/export and intellectual property, and digitize forms and documents to enable women’s access to information, reduce market barriers, and prevent, mitigate, and respond to gender-based violence, such as at border crossings.

We will look for opportunities to improve competitiveness within supply chains to ensure they are more equitable by addressing barriers to participation for women-owned and -led businesses in target supply chain markets, emerging green and blue economic sectors, and innovation industries, such as the climate technology sector. We will also advocate for improving women’s access to, control over, and benefit from assets and productive resources.

To increase access to finance, we will promote with financial intermediaries the increased availability of women- and women entrepreneur-targeted financial products and services adapted to their unique needs, which may include the provision of bundled services such as insurance, microenterprise credit, education, health and agricultural credit, mentorships, training, and access to business coaching networks for women entering trade sectors and value chains.

We will promote the availability, access, and use of gender indicators and sex-disaggregated data regarding entrepreneurship, financial and digital inclusion, trade promotion, and investment. This includes tracking the gender wealth and wage gaps, the proportion of investments in and credit offered to women-owned and -led businesses, and asset ownership at the individual and household level.

We will encourage governments and private sector partners to provide a wide array of financial products and services for savings, investment, credit, payments, and insurance that target, reach, and benefit women and girls as well as offer support on user-centered design that incorporates gender dynamics. And we will encourage investment in fund and depository institutions led by and for women.

We will advocate expanded access to resources, including land and property, and funding, including alternative lending programs, blended finance, and microlending. We will recommend the inclusion of training on financial management, gender-lens investing across asset classes and along the capital curve (from philanthropy to investment) and along the life cycle of business growth (“patient capital”).

In this same vein, through PGII we will advocate infrastructure projects that require resettlement and offer the opportunity to close gender gaps in property ownership through joint titling of new land, which helps eliminate barriers to women’s control of assets and provides collateral for credit and savings. Joint land titling can also enhance women’s participation in decision-making and reduce gender-based violence.

We will work and consult with financial institutions; the private sector; civil society; labor unions, including women labor union leaders; and governments working at the local level, to expand access to capital and savings through microcredit and village savings and loan models, collateral-free access to working capital, loan guarantees, and support for women-owned and women-led businesses, including women’s cooperatives.

We note that women are well positioned to lead and make sustainable change in certain sectors where green jobs will be created, such as agriculture, fisheries, forestry, tourism, and garment and textile industries. To encourage and foster women’s participation in entrepreneurship as well as in leadership and management, we will promote climate finance that increases gender equality and support capacity development and access to financial services for women innovating in green and blue sectors.

We will encourage the payment of social payments and cash transfers to be digitally directed to women, where possible and appropriate, to help ensure it reaches them and is spent on their priorities.

To improve women’s access to digital platforms, we will work to strengthen digital infrastructure, including access to secure broadband and/or Wi-Fi networks, affordable data, digital identification, data protection, and affordable digital tools.

Around the world, women lack digital skills training. Without a knowledge of how to access the internet, use online resources, or basic digital literacy, they cannot create or grow online businesses, which have increased considerably during the pandemic. We will support initiatives that ensure the equitable use of and access to technology free from online harassment and abuse through digital skills building, the creation of e-commerce toolkits to digitalize businesses, and partnership with the private sector to address technology-facilitated gender-based violence.

b. Training and Capacity-Building for Women, Women-Owned Businesses, and Businesses that Promote Gender Equality

Knowledge and skills gaps among women entrepreneurs, as well as a lack of access to training to address these gaps, act as major barriers to promoting women’s entrepreneurship and innovation around the globe. Women entrepreneurs are often constrained by a lack of familiarity with business essentials, including contracting, licensing, training, government programs, and opportunities for international trade, including those available under trade preference programs. Similarly, women’s limited access to information, credit, capital, and other resources and support services, as well as women’s constrained participation in decision-making processes and income-generating activities hinders their economic security and empowerment. For example, women entrepreneurs receive only three percent of venture capital funding despite representing over 36 percent of all American businesses.³⁵ Networking, both within and across organizations, can play a crucial role in helping underrepresented groups find partners.

To address these gaps, we will seek to advance women’s education and skills building in business administration, technology transfer, procurement processes, worker rights, financial and digital literacy, marketing, and branding, as well as how to become a supplier, and how to manage seed funding. We will also advocate for training, networking, and mentorship throughout every stage of a woman entrepreneur’s development.

The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR) is an important aspect to women’s entrepreneurial success around the world. To support transparency and increase women’s knowledge and skills in the trade and regulatory environment, including intellectual property, we will co-sponsor, design and provide intellectual property subject matter expertise such as through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, to international educational and technical assistance programs covering patents, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets, and enforcement of intellectual property protections in the context of a business strategy. We will also work on processes and systems to encourage and promote inclusive innovation and inclusive protection of innovation, so that we increase the number of women and girls who own IPR.

We will advocate that governments post transparent and easy-to-access regulations, policies, and procedures at customs / border crossings (land, air, sea) and ensure border management that promotes gender equality and women’s economic security. We will encourage governments to focus on digitizing physical trade lanes and entry requirements to make trade documentation and processes less complex and to address supply chain bottlenecks.

Recognizing that growth is not always synonymous with success, we will look at the full spectrum of women owned, led, and managed businesses to best support women’s entrepreneurship. We will provide entrepreneurship training at every entrepreneurial stage to empower women with the knowledge, networks, and access they need to launch and scale a business to be profitable. This includes increasing women’s leadership in management and executive positions.

We will also engage the suppliers of services to educate organizations such as financial institutions and supply chain private sector actors on the benefits of adapting safeguards such as employer policies, practices, and codes of conduct that demonstrate organizational intent to do no harm and a commitment to gender equity and equality.

c. Amplifying the Voices of Women Workers, Women Labor Leaders, Women Entrepreneurs and Women Innovators

Around the world there is an absence of inclusive support systems for women, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and there is a risk of additional challenges that are likely to be aggravated both by the long-term effects of the pandemic as well as by the climate crisis.

To provide an ecosystem of support for women to strengthen their economic resilience, amplify their voices, and address their needs, we will promote women’s participation and leadership within employers’ and employees’ associations, which are often male dominated, to improve gender equity and equality. We will support and increase women’s participation and leadership in trade and business associations that will amplify women’s voices and representation in policy making, business and employer decision-making, and network building and mentorship.

We will support the establishment of platforms where informal and micro, small, and medium enterprises – many owned and led by women – can share best practices for improving the resilience of MSMEs, including through the development of business contingency plans and mechanisms to respond to crises and improve access to social protection, such as unemployment insurance, disaster and liability insurance, and health care.

We will encourage increasing support to organizations that help women start and grow businesses, which in turn will provide women with improved income and opportunities to deliver solutions to local and global challenges. We will support efforts among organizations supporting MSMEs to improve knowledge of and respect for internationally recognized labor rights, including acceptable conditions of work and workers’ rights to work in freedom from discrimination, forced labor, and child labor; to form, join, and lead labor unions; and to contribute to and lead collective bargaining efforts to improve labor protections.

We will amplify and promote the work and voices of women in support of their efforts to start, lead, and manage enterprises, initiatives, and programs that are improving their own and other women’s economic security, developing entrepreneurial or innovative solutions to local and global challenges, or otherwise centering attention on women and girls as entrepreneurial and innovative agents of change.

Measuring Success

We believe that women entrepreneurs, business leaders, and workers can achieve economic security through entrepreneurship, financial and digital inclusion, increased worker organizing, voice, and democratic worker representation, and inclusive trade and investment, when there is gender parity in financing to and investments in women-owned and -led businesses; when women entrepreneurs have equal and equitable access to and leverage digital technologies for their businesses; women-owned and -led MSMEs have strengthened their resilience in cases of economic shocks and crises; when all MSMEs and large companies promote gender equality in their operations and supply chains; when all MSMEs and large companies understand the importance of and respect in practice the labor rights of their workers; when women-owned and -led businesses enjoy equal access to information on trade agreements, policies, and procurement opportunities; and when legal frameworks and institutions promote and protect equal and equitable opportunity for women entrepreneurs and women-owned and -led businesses and their workers.

To track the U.S. government’s contribution to these outcomes, we propose the following topline metrics:

Overall metrics and reporting practices in support of the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security can be found in the Metrics and Reporting section.

Dismantling Systemic Barriers to Women's Participation

Our Vision is to dismantle systemic barriers to ensure women’s full and meaningful participation in the economy and workforce and to create a level playing field for women and girls, in all their diversity, to learn, innovate, access decent work, compete, and succeed.

We believe that if we are successful in socializing, adopting, strengthening, and enforcing laws, regulations, and policies that improve gender equality, then women and girls will have the freedom to create, innovate, access decent work, compete in global and local markets and, most importantly, succeed. These include laws, regulations, and policies that include those pertaining to women’s land, property, and intellectual property rights and tenure; inheritance rights; investing in education and training; developing mentoring networks; addressing and valuing unpaid labor; and countering harmful social and gender norms, including those related to family life, workplace culture, gender-based violence, gender expression and identity, and other forms of discrimination.

Goals: We aspire to: close persistent data gaps in measuring women’s economic security by improving sex-disaggregated data collection and reporting; utilize cross- and multi-sectoral, integrated, and intersectional approaches to address the legal, political, business, and regulatory barriers that undermine women’s economic security and present challenges to obtaining decent work and wage employment, successful innovation opportunities and entrepreneurship, and full and equitable participation in the economy; ensure women’s equal right to inheritance, land, and property; increase participation in the intellectual property ecosystem; increase investments in education to create pathways to jobs and professional advancement; dismantle discriminatory and harmful social and gender norms; and prevent, mitigate, and respond to gender-based violence in the world of work.

Our Strategy

Gender inequality is both a cause and a consequence of poverty, reinforced by gender and social norms – including gender-based violence and discriminatory employer policies and practices, limited access to business support systems, reduced opportunities for wealth creation, limited access to health services, including sexual and reproductive health services, and discriminatory laws and regulations – which limit the ability of women to fully participate and lead in the economy.

Examples of systemic barriers to women’s meaningful participation in the economy include:

• Gender-based violence and sexual harassment, including in the world of work;
• Forced early retirement for women;
• Weak anti-harassment policies and anti-discrimination legal protections on the basis of sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation;
• A lack of reasonable disability accommodations;
• A lack of flexible work policies and parental or care giver paid leave laws;
• A lack of or unenforced equal pay policies; and
• Barriers to lending, investing, insurance, and inheritance.

Due to these barriers, many women participate in informal work that is low-wage, unregulated, and dangerous. Unfortunately, progress towards reform has been delayed and, in many instances, reversed due to COVID-19.

To mitigate and eliminate these barriers, Departments and Agencies will focus on:

a. Encouraging the Adoption and Enforcement of Laws, Regulations, and Policies That Promote Gender Equality

Discriminatory laws and policies in some countries hinder women’s employment, entrepreneurship, and access to and control over assets and resources, such as land, other collateral goods, and finance. Some countries have labor force and employment restrictions that limit women’s career progression, with laws and policies that prohibit women from working in specific sectors or make it more challenging for women to work in certain roles that potentially offer higher pay. In many countries, laws criminalizing LGBTQI+ status disproportionately impact LGBTQI+ women and girls. Legally recognized marriage, including civil unions and other forms of legal recognition of LGBTQI+ families bestows credibility, confers tangible benefits and rights, and supports full social inclusion. Those who wish to have their families recognized should be able to do so. Systemic gender bias in lawmaking, legislation, political underrepresentation, regulations, policies, and procedures also impedes women’s economic security. Even in countries with fewer legal barriers, enforcing laws and ensuring that administrative processes and procedures promote gender equality and women’s economic security remain a challenge.

To address this, we will propose revisions to, training on, and more robust and equitable implementation of laws strengthening women’s rights such as those relating to child, early, and forced marriage, divorce, pensions, inheritance, personal status, mobility, sexual and reproductive health and rights, land, business, and property ownership, and national identification, and nondiscrimination protections on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, and sex characteristics.

We will advocate the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights and educate women on the value of, and how to gain access to, intellectual property ownership, including the use of intellectual property to secure public and private capital and in career advancement.

We will encourage a systemic approach to legal reform implementation that includes consensus building, increasing through education and training broad awareness of relevant laws and systemic racial and gender discrimination used to weaken collective power, supporting implementation of laws by authorities, and promoting women’s access to legal recourse, social dialogue, freedom of association and collective bargaining. We will encourage legislatures to repeal discriminatory laws and promote the adoption, implementation, and enforcement of laws instrumental for achieving women’s economic security, including those that protect internationally recognized labor rights to work in freedom from discrimination, child labor, and forced labor.

b. Ensuring Women’s Equal Enjoyment of Land, Water, and Property Rights

Ensuring land, water, and property rights are equally available to women will increase women’s control over and use of land and other natural resources, provide collateral for financing needs, and increase women’s economic agency. Rights to own land and water may also contribute to women’s institutional involvement and political participation, boosting their power as changemakers and contributors in their communities, ultimately enhancing their presence and influence in local, national, and global level action and policy making.

We will discuss the importance of land, water, and gender equality with relevant ministries, local actors, non-governmental organizations, and multilateral actors and elevate the role of women and rural land users in climate change adaptation and mitigation, including with respect to clean energy, sustainable agriculture, water usage, climate technology and innovation, and other relevant themes.

And we will support governments’ implementation of and reporting on international obligations and commitments on women’s land, water, and property rights, including: the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women,³⁶ the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas,³⁷ UNCCD’s standards on gender and tenure and land degradation neutrality, FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines, the Sustainable Development Goals and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

c. Investing in Education to Create Pathways to Jobs, Career Advancement, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship

We will promote investment in quality, accessible education (i.e., pre-primary, primary, secondary, vocational, technical, and higher education) and informal education, such as soft skills building and leadership training, in coordination with legal and structural reforms to create stronger pathways from education to employment, particularly for youth in vulnerable situations. We will advocate free public primary and secondary education and private and higher education that is affordable or that includes reasonable financing options.

We will encourage programs that foster interest in studying Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, encourage innovation, create a more enabling environment in schools, and promote entrepreneurship. We will continue to advocate scholarships and grants, exchange programs, the exchange of different scientific knowledge systems and practices, and school competitions in STEM, medicine, climate, the environment, and other lucrative fields.

We will encourage advancement opportunities for women in leadership positions, including professional development and training. We will support companies that wish to design and implement gender action plans that promote equal pay, support women’s career paths, and provide opportunities to access higher-level positions. And we will encourage public-private partnerships, when appropriate, to promote gender equality in company operations and supply chains, and to unlock innovative and entrepreneurial solutions.

d. Preventing and Responding to Gender-Based Violence and Addressing Discriminatory and Harmful Gender and Social Norms and Practices

The root cause of many challenges to women’s meaningful economic participation is gender-based discrimination and harmful social norms that marginalize women, LGBTQI+ people and women in vulnerable groups, including those with disabilities, migrants, racial, linguistic, or ethnic marginalized groups, or Indigenous peoples, and women and girls living in poverty. These social structures perpetuate disadvantage and contribute to, for example, the devaluing of care work, discriminatory laws and practices limiting women’s ability to access and control land, property, and finances, women’s disproportionate responsibility for unpaid care work, factors contributing to wage and wealth gaps, women’s disproportionate representation in the informal economy, limited representation in leadership positions in the formal economy, and gender-based violence and harassment.

Sexual harassment and abuse negatively impact women’s ability to receive promotions, equal pay, mentorship, and advancement opportunities in their careers and businesses, particularly in high-value work that is traditionally and disproportionately carried out by men and boys of working age. Workforce participation may expose women and LGBTQI+ persons to workplace violence and harassment especially in informal, casual, and short-term positions where workers are most vulnerable and may lack sufficient bargaining power, legal and social safety nets, and other protections. As women earn income and defy entrenched social norms, men may use violence as an attempt to control them and their family members. Those with heightened economic dependence on others and a lack of knowledge and understanding of their rights, including persons with disabilities, migrant workers, and individuals who have experienced trafficking, face higher risks of gender-based violence, including the withholding of economic resources as a form of coercion.

To address this, we will ensure that approaches are evidence-based and appropriate as well as cross- and multi-sectoral, integrated, inclusive, accessible, and intersectional to support the full participation of all women and girls of working age in the economy. This will require adopting a systems approach to women’s economic security by addressing challenges – including harmful social norms, gender-based violence, women’s unequal care responsibilities, and women’s health – at the cultural, societal, policy, institutional, community, workplace, household, and individual levels. This approach, and the efforts outlined below, are aligned with the U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally, which recognizes addressing gender-based violence as a primary component of the enabling environment for economic empowerment and participation of women and girls, in all their diversity.

Other lines of effort in this Strategy previously defined several harmful social and gender norms that we will address through the engagement of a wide variety of stakeholders. We will reach out to religious and traditional community leaders, indigenous authorities, teachers and school administrators, local women’s organizations, LGBTQI+ organizations, parents and in-laws, community elders, tribal members, men, and boys, all who can promote change rather than propagate negative gender norms, including regarding child, early, and forced marriage and unions and the victimization of widows. We will have conversations with people who hold decision-making, bargaining, and economic power in their communities to encourage them to revisit how they think about, speak about, and act upon social and gender norms, beliefs, and practices. This will include applying successful methodologies and creating safe spaces that promote physical and psychological safety.

We will seek to improve attitudes towards women’s employment outside the home through changes to how all members of society communicate on social and behavioral issues impacting women. We will address gender stereotyping in education to expand the idea of what is possible for women and reduce gender-segregation in the labor market.

We will engage in policy and programming with an attention to preventing, mitigating, and responding to gender-based violence in the workplace and throughout USG project lifecycles. This includes mitigating risks, safeguarding women and girls, and preparing for unintended consequences and trade-offs of economic participation, including gender-based violence or harassment in the home and workplace. Likewise, we will strengthen standard operating procedures for survivor-centered, trauma-informed gender-based violence response interventions, including clear referral pathways, and enhance survivor support and access to medical, psychosocial, social, and justice services.

We will encourage the embedding of physical well-being, sexual and reproductive health and rights, health screening and education, and psychosocial health support into economic interventions. We will encourage investments in mental health and psychosocial support, including mental health of men and boys. We will also promote social and emotional intelligence.

We will sensitize journalists and other media to address workplace gender-based violence through their platforms, including how to address stereotypes related to violence and harassment and how to include and engage with men and broader community leaders in gender-based violence prevention efforts.

We will urge businesses to encourage supervisors, management, and leadership to take leadership and communications skills training and support the formation of employee working groups comprised of intended benefactors of the interventions to help shape, institute, and implement safeguarding policies for preventing, mitigating, responding, and reporting gender-based violence and harassment in the world of work. This includes establishing workplace protections from retaliation and supporting survivors and bystanders to report workplace harassment or abuse, integrating men as partners and colleagues in understanding the impacts of violence, and encouraging interventions.

We will assist governments to enact or strengthen the implementation of laws against gender-based violence in the workplace; laws, policies and regulations that support flexible leave and workplace protections; support survivors and witnesses of workplace harassment or abuse to report such occurrences without fear, penalty, or risk of retaliation; and enable employers and employees to effectively apply those regulations in their work, whether it is online or offline.

We will support targeted initiatives to support survivors of gender-based violence to enter or re-enter the workforce or to protect existing jobs, and develop and implement survivor-centered and informed accountability mechanisms and enforcement.

e. Increasing Understanding Through Improved Data Collection

To better understand the current operating environment, we will endeavor to increase the collection of gender- and sex-disaggregated data broadly, in both the bilateral and multilateral spheres. Bilaterally, we will recommend the creation of government programs and policies to review, highlight, and address discriminatory laws and regulations, employer workplace policies and practices, social norms, and corporate legal frameworks. We will advocate that governments create incentives for companies to adopt non-discriminatory equivalents.

We will advocate incorporating a multi-layered intersectional approach into the design of data collection systems and work to increase the capacity of national statistical offices to close gender and sex data gaps. Our efforts and advocacy will reflect our commitment to collect, analyze, and publish gender- and sex-disaggregated data using intersectional approaches in our own programs.

We will also encourage public financial management that increases gender equality or the use of gender budgeting, including in our own government, to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion in economic recovery and the adoption of measurement tools to track progress.

Measuring Success

We believe that dismantling systemic barriers to women’s economic security and participation will be achieved when we see supportive legal frameworks adopted, codified, and implemented. Legal frameworks will ensure women’s full economic participation when they address gender discrimination, including rights to land and property, and prevent, mitigate, and respond to gender-based violence. In addition, we will measure changes in social and gender norms that impact women and girls’ opportunities to access education, pursue economic opportunities, advance in leadership positions, and have control over their income and assets, free from discrimination and violence.

To track the U.S. government’s contribution to the outcomes outlined in this line of effort, we propose the following topline metrics:

Overall metrics and reporting practices in support of the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security can be found in the Metrics and Reporting section.

Our overall vision for the U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security is for women and girls globally to be economically secure, and fully and equally contributing to and benefiting from global prosperity. Our approach to metrics for the Strategy is to choose indicators and milestones that allow us to measure the collective and incremental progress toward this vision as articulated in the theories of change within each Line of Effort.

The following results framework will guide the measurement of this Strategy.

1) Women achieve economic competitiveness through well-paying, quality jobs and decent work.​

• 1.1  Women and girls have access to education and skills building opportunities.​
• 1.2  Social, legal, policy, and institutional supports and protections are improved for women’s access to and retention in well-paying jobs.​
• 1.3  Women access professional development and leadership opportunities. ​

(2) Women and girls access a strengthened global care infrastructure that includes protections for the caregiving workforce. ​

• 2.1  Public and private sector investment in care infrastructure increases.​
• 2.2  Social and legal protections improve to support caregivers and domestic workers.​
• 2.3  Women’s influence is strengthened through education, advocacy, and collective action.​
• 2.4  Social norms are transformed to advance care infrastructure and value domestic work.​

(3) Women entrepreneurs and women-led businesses have the tools and opportunities to grow their businesses and compete in local, regional, and global marketplaces.​

• 3.1  Women entrepreneurs and women-led businesses access capital and digital technologies to start, grow, and adapt their businesses. ​
• 3.2  Women entrepreneurs and institutions serving women entrepreneurs improve business knowledge and skills.​
• 3.3  Women entrepreneurs have networks of support and collectively voice their needs.​

(4) Systemic gender barriers are transformed to enable women’s meaningful economic participation.​

• 4.1  Understanding of barriers to women’s economic security is increased through improved data collection.​
• 4.2  Legal frameworks supporting women’s economic security, including prohibiting gender-based violence and harassment, are strengthened, implemented, and enforced.​
• 4.3  Women’s rights to land and property are codified into law and upheld in practice.​
• 4.4  Early education for girls is adapted and strengthened to create pathways to jobs and career advancement. ​
• 4.5  Harmful social norms, including those that perpetuate gender-based violence, are transformed to uphold women’s rights to meaningful economic participation. 

The indicators selected will help determine progress across the U.S. Government toward achieving our vision. Each Agency and Department is unique, with different expertise and mandates to contribute to our vision, and different ways of measuring contributions. Overall metrics for the Strategy are therefore intended to understand what we can achieve as a collective interagency, while each Agency and Department will likely choose more detailed and fulsome metrics that capture their contributions as articulated in their implementation plan. In order to gather data that is both useful and feasible across the interagency, we have worked to select metrics that are relevant to as many stakeholders as possible and that have been used and validated widely both across U.S. government interagency stakeholders as well as non-governmental partners and multilateral stakeholders. Custom metrics for the Strategy will require further definition from each reporting Department and Agency that captures more precise units of measurement and methodologies specific to their work and data collection. Where definitions of custom metrics differ, they will be presented in the report as separate indicators and will not be aggregated.

In measuring our progress in implementing the Strategy, we aim to measure not only what we achieve, but also how we achieve it. As articulated in the National Strategy for Gender Equity and Equality (National Gender Strategy) as well as the strategies supporting it (U.S. Strategy on Women Peace and Security, the U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally, and this U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security), success does not solely lie in the final outcomes we are able to achieve, but also in the process by which we do our work in order to effect lasting change. An important feature of the Strategy metrics is the process-oriented milestones that are common across the strategies under the National Gender Strategy.

Departments and Agencies will prepare their reports for submission to the White House Gender Policy Council annually, with the expectation that a single, U.S. Government consolidated report will be published every year. Each Department and Agency contributing to the implementation of the Strategy will document how they will collect and measure progress for annual reporting and which metrics they plan to report against. There will be expected variations in indicator selection based on each Agency and Department’s mission and organizational structure. Reporting will include qualitative narratives to fully capture each Department and Agency’s implementation of the Strategy. Combining and analyzing each Department and Agency’s reporting across the interagency will require the Gender Policy Council and leadership to synthesize the reports, as described in the process milestones below.

Metrics by Line of Effort

Line of Effort 1: Promoting Economic Competitiveness through Well-paying, Quality Jobs

Long-term outcome: Women achieve economic competitiveness through well-paying, quality jobs and decent work.

Short-term outcomes:

• 1.1 Women and girls have access to education and skills-building opportunities, including in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields
• 1.2 Social, legal, employer policy, and institutional supports and protections are improved for women’s access to and retention in well-paying jobs
• 1.3 Women have access to professional development and are recruited, retained, and promoted into management and leadership opportunities

ii. Job quality will be measured using the Better Work Compliance Assessment Tool. It assesses compliance with core international labor standards and national labor law. Job quality for the purposes of this indicator encompasses the following core international labor standards: Child labor; Discrimination; Forced Labor; Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining. Working conditions standards are drawn from each country’s national labor law. Areas assessed include: Compensation; Contract and Workplace Relations; Occupational Safety and Health; Working Time. For more information, see: https://betterwork.org/portfolio/better-works-global-compliance-assessment-tool/#1472163251185-701116e5-c8191365-52ab 
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Line of Effort 2: Advancing Care Infrastructure and Valuing Domestic Work

Long-term outcome: Women and girls access a strengthened global care infrastructure that includes protections for the caregiving workforce

Short-term outcomes:

• 2.1 Public and private sector investment in care infrastructure increases.
• 2.2 Social and legal protections improve to support caregivers and domestic workers.
• 2.3 Women’s influence is strengthened through education, advocacy, and collective action.
• 2.4 Social norms are transformed to advance care infrastructure and value domestic work.

_{*Other Departments and Agencies will report as applicable.}

Line of Effort 3: Promoting Entrepreneurship and Financial, and Digital Inclusion, including through Trade and Investment

Long-term outcome: Women entrepreneurs, women-led businesses, women workers, and women labor leaders have the tools and opportunities to grow their businesses and compete in local, regional, and global marketplaces

Short-term outcomes:

• 3.1 Women entrepreneurs and women-led businesses access capital to start, grow, and adapt their businesses.
• 3.2 Women entrepreneurs and institutions serving women entrepreneurs improve business knowledge and skills.
• 3.3 Women entrepreneurs have networks of support and collectively voice their needs.

Line of Effort 4: Dismantling Systemic Gender Barriers

Long-term outcome: Systemic gender barriers are transformed to enable women’s meaningful participation.

Short-term outcomes:

• 4.1 Understanding of barriers to women’s economic security is increased through improved data collection.
• 4.2 Legal frameworks supporting women’s economic security, including prohibiting gender-based violence and harassment, are strengthened and implemented.
• 4.3 Women’s right to own land and property are codified into law and upheld in practice.
• 4.4 Early education for girls is adapted and strengthened to create pathways to jobs and career advancement.
• 4.5 Discriminatory and harmful social norms, including those that perpetuate gender-based violence (GBV), are transformed to uphold women’s rights to meaningful economic participation.

Core Process Milestones

The U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security, in alignment with the National Gender Strategy, acknowledges that we cannot achieve our intended vision or outcomes if we do not conduct our core functions in a way that promotes gender equity and equality. We will track progress toward the following milestones as a key part of our overall monitoring of the Strategy’s achievements.

The White House Gender Policy Council is grateful for the countless hours, dedication, thoughtful input, and deep expertise that guided the development of this U.S. Strategy on Women’s Economic Security.

We thank the twelve U.S. Government Departments and Agencies and each of the components within the Executive Office of the President for their contributions. Senior Designees from each Department and Agency shared their vision, ideas, and feedback on the content of this Strategy. The creation of this U.S. Strategy on Global Women’s Economic Security has only been possible through collaboration across the federal government and extensive engagement with domestic and international partners.

We are also grateful to the diverse range of external stakeholders who provided input and recommendations for the strategy. We thank the more than 200 nonprofit and community-based organizations, civil society groups, private sector entities, unions, worker organizations, and academics representing more than 30 countries from around the world for their critical insights as well as the valuable perspectives offered by our partners in other governments and multilateral organizations.

Just as the formation of this Strategy would not have been possible without rigorous engagement from a broad group of stakeholders, our continued collaboration will be key to guaranteeing its successful implementation and long-term sustainability. We look forward to continuing this collaboration in the years ahead, in service of our vision of a world where women and girls around the world are economically secure and can fully, meaningfully, and equitably contribute to and benefit from global prosperity, regardless of their race, color, ethnicity, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or sex characteristics.

1. Decent work, as embodied in the four pillars of the ILO’s Decent Work Agenda, is the convergence of job creation, rights at work, social protection, and social dialogue. See: Decent work (ilo.org)   
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2. ILO Brief, What Works No. 10, Economic Impacts of Reducing the Gender Gap – https://www.ilo.org/global/research/publications/what-works/WCMS_577685/lang–en/index.htm   
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3. World Economic Forum, “Global Gender Gap Report 2021.” https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2021.pdf  
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4. World Bank, Women, Business and the Law report 2022 https://wbl.worldbank.org/en/wbl   
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5. Canning, David et al. 2021. The Lancet. “The economic consequences of reproductive health and family planning.” Volume 380, Issue 9837, 165-171. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(12)60827-7/fulltext   
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6. Economic Benefits of Investing in Women’s Health: A Systematic Review  by Kristine Husoy, Onarheim, Johanne Helene Iversen and David E. Bloom. Demonstrates that poor health among women has generational repercussions and impacts their current labor force participation.
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7. Sarah Gammage, Shareen Joshi & Yana van der Meulen Rodgers (2020) The Intersections of Women’s Economic and Reproductive Empowerment , Feminist Economics, 26:1, 1-22, DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2019.1674451; Specific study sources cited: (Thévenon 2016; Strupat 2017; Connelly et al. 2018).
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8. https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—gender/documents/publication/wcms_814499.pdf  
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9. https://ilostat.ilo.org/over-2-million-moms-left-the-labour-force-in-2020-according-to-new-global-estimates/  
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10. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/10-million-additional-girls-risk-child-marriage-due-covid-19  
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11. Political participation by women leads to increases in women’s economic participation, empowerment and other benefits: Gates Foundation case study: Bolivia 1993 – 2010 ; Gates Foundation Case study: India – Himachal Pradesh 1990-2015 .
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12. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/3247/text 
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13. Trade Policy Staff Committee (ref: 19 USC 2171)
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14. TPCC (ref: 15 USC 4727)
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15. The Do No Harm principle is derived from the DNH principle or Hippocratic Oath in the medical field and was adapted to the humanitarian field in the 1990s and 2000s with the recognition that in fragile and conflict affected states, aid has the potential to exacerbate conflict and can do harm, particularly among the most marginalized communities. It has since been more widely used across the development field as well. See also OECD: https://www.oecd.org/dac/conflict-fragility-resilience/docs/38368714.pdf 
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16. The U.S. and 20 donors signed mutual commitments at the International Safeguarding Summit  in London in 2018. This was followed by the OECD-DAC developing PSEA pillars  that the USG also endorsed.
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17. The “Nothing about us without us” principle comes from South Africa. It was a slogan used in the 1990s by the disability rights movement. It has since been adopted by human rights actors and those in the development and humanitarian fields to convey that people from marginalized communities who are often excluded from decision-making spaces should have seats at the table particularly when articulating policy and actions that directly affect them.
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18. See: Decent work (ilo.org) 
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19. https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/College/opportunitycost.html 
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20. Evans, Nancy J. and Jamie Washington (2000). “Becoming an Ally: A New Examination.” Readings for Diversity and Social Justice, second edition.
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21. Drawing from the ILO definition of social protection as the set of public measures that a society provides for its members to protect them against economic and social distress caused by the absence of or a substantial reduction in income from work, as a result of various contingencies (sickness, maternity, employment injury, unemployment, invalidity, old age, or death of the breadwinner), as well as the provision of health care and benefits for families with children, U.S. Government Department and Agencies will advocate policies and programs that strengthen protection systems, including social safety nets that support businesses to prevent job layoffs and the promotion of policies that include the provision of cash transfers and other benefits.
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22. Internationally-recognized labor rights include: (a) freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining; (b) the elimination of all forms of forced or compulsory labor; (c) the effective abolition of child labor, a prohibition on the worst forms of child labor, and other labor protections for children and minors; (d) the elimination of discrimination in respect of employment and occupation; and (e) acceptable conditions of work with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health.
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23. Convention C189 – Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) (ilo.org) 
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24. ILO Convention190 
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25. https://www.equalpayinternationalcoalition.org/ 
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26. Hunt, J., 2016. Why do women leave science and engineering? ILR Review, 69(1), pp. 199-226
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27. Toole, A.A., M.J. Saksena, C.A.W. deGrazia, K.P. Black, F. Lissoni, E. Miguelez, and G. Tarasconi, 2020. Progress and Potential: 2020 update on U.S. women inventor-patentees. U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, 2020. Available at: Progress and Potential: 2020 update (uspto.gov) 
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28. According to the OECD: “Unpaid care and domestic work refers to all non-market, unpaid activities carried out in households – including both direct care of persons, such as children or elderly, and indirect care, such as cooking, cleaning or fetching water.” OECD Care Work 
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29. https://www.usaid.gov/news-information/press-releases/apr-28-2022-usaid-announces-plans-invest-50-million-global-child-care 
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30. The World Bank, Women, Business and the Law 2022 report, https://wbl.worldbank.org/en/wbl 
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31. Social dialogue (GOVERNANCE) (ilo.org) 
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32. Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum in partnership with the International Monetary Fund, International Finance Corporation, and EDGE, Gender Balance Index 2022, https://www.omfif.org/gbi22/ 
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33. Domestic servitude and ritual slavery, e.g. in Africa http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1996-20962017000100006 
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34. https://www.fao.org/food-systems/en/ 
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35. E. Williams-Baron, J. Milli, and B. Gault, 2018. Innovation and intellectual property among women entrepreneurs. Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2018. Available at: C472_Report-Innovation-and-Entrepreneurship-9.6.18-clean.pdf (iwpr.org) 
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36. https://www.ohchr.org/en/treaty-bodies/cedaw 
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37. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1650694?ln=en 
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