Women's Employment and Energy Toolkit

Increasing women’s economic participation in the global workforce is a core goal of the World Bank Group, and increasing women’s employment in energy utilities is one of the goals of ESMAP’s Gender and Energy Program. This toolkit is designed to be a compendium of practical resources that World Bank teams, utility staff, and project designers/implementers can use to design and implement activities focused on increasing women’s employment in the power sector.

Why Does Women’s Employment in Energy Utilities Matter?

There is a growing body of evidence that increased economic representation of women has benefits to society at the national, individual, and organizational levels. For instance:

• At the national level, research by McKinsey shows that increasing gender parity in the workplace could add as much $12 trillion to the global economy.
• For women, traditionally male-dominated sectors like energy generally offer higher wages and provide work in a critical sector intricately linked to a country’s socioeconomic development. ¹
• At the company level, increased gender participation and equality in the workforce is associated with better financial performance, improved employee satisfaction and retention, greater innovation, and enhanced reputation. ²

What Do We Know About Women’s Employment in Energy Utilities?

Globally all branches of the energy sector are male-dominated; a study by Ernst & Young of the world’s largest electric utilities by revenue revealed that women constitute a minority in all of them, though there are significant regional differences. This finding was echoed by World Bank research, which found women constituted 21% of the overall workforce in energy utilities in a sample of African countries, compared to 4% in utilities in Pakistan. Occupational segregation within utilities is commonplace, with most women working in administrative or corporate positions (i.e., human resources, legal, etc) and relatively few in technical positions or senior management. Figure 1: Women in Leadership in the World’s 200 Largest Utilities and Figure 2: Women Leaders by Region show the relative numbers of women in various levels of management and in different locales over five years (pre-COVID) as found in the Ernst & Young study. ³

What is the Objective of This Toolkit?

The World Bank has already identified barriers to women’s employment in infrastructure sectors, especially in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) positions, in the Stepping Up Women’s STEM Careers in Infrastructure: An Overview of Promising Approaches series. Building on that report, and with support from the UK Government’s Energy and Economic Growth (EEG) Programme, ESMAP has conducted research focusing on how utilities can improve their efforts to attract/recruit women for technical positions, how they can retain them in the utility workforce, and how they can advance them into management positions to reduce gender gaps in utility employment.

Figure 3: Stages of the Employee Life Cycle Impacted by Gender Inequality

Source: Stepping Up Women’s STEM Careers

How to Use this Toolkit

The toolkit contains four modules, each thematically focused. The first module addresses setting up a data-driven program and strategy with achievable targets; modules 2-4 focus on overcoming barriers to increased women’s employment according to the stage of a woman’s career.

The four modules are:

1. Making the Commitment to Gender Equality
2. Attracting and Recruiting Women
3. Creating a Supportive Work Environment
4. Advancing Women in the Company

The resources were created by a variety of organizations, including government institutions, universities, development agencies, non-profits, and private-sector consultancies and membership organizations. All of the resources are freely available online to the public, and the majority consist of toolkits and guides that provide frameworks, checklists and document templates rather than reports. All are in English, though some are also available in other languages.

The resources were selected based on their potential applicability to energy utilities and as potential reference points for utilities wishing to undertake related initiatives. Resources created specifically for use in the energy sector were prioritized, but in some cases resources created for other sectors have also been included. Given that many of the topics covered are subject to national laws and regulations and/or collective bargaining agreements, many of the resources were designed for use by businesses in a specific geographic location and cultural context. Utilities in other areas will have to review and adapt such resources to meet local circumstances before utilizing them.

By clicking on the relevant section and/or sub-topic, you’ll find corresponding resources and tools.