Browse by: "G"

Fostering gender inclusion can have positive impacts on the food systems' triple challenge of ensuring food security and nutrition for a growing population, supporting the livelihoods of millions of people working in the food supply chain, and doing so in an environmentally sustainable way. Yet these positive synergies are often invisible as sex-disaggregated information is not collected. This report calls for the development of better evidence on gender and food systems as a necessary first step in the path towards gender equality. Based on OECD countries’ experiences, it provides a roadmap to identify and overcome evidence gaps on gender aspects and policies that address gender inequality in food systems with the aim of advancing women’s contribution to food systems.

The economic and fiscal costs of gender inequalities, such as the gender employment gap, are high. Intersectional analysis improves understanding of gender gaps and the measures needed to address them. This paper looks at how gender budgeting can be expanded to include intersectional analysis, allowing for consideration of how gender inequalities intersect with inequalities based on race, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation and disability. It provides examples from governments that have started to incorporate an intersectional approach to gender budgeting. It also highlights the main benefits and challenges associated with intersectional analysis and considers what governments can do to support an intersectional approach to gender budgeting.

Gender gaps persist in the labour market, with women less likely than men to be in employment in all OECD countries. This paper highlights the economic and fiscal dividends that could be achieved from closing the gender employment gap. It shows that increasing women’s participation in the labour market can bring positive GDP and productivity gains, as well as improvements to fiscal sustainability. Increased participation of women in the workforce is particularly helpful in the context of the shrinking labour forces that many OECD countries are expected to face over the coming decades. The paper illustrates how gender budgeting can be used by governments to mobilise policy making to close gender gaps in the labour market and help realise these economic and fiscal gains.

This paper investigates the link between gender diversity in senior management and firm-level productivity. For this purpose, it constructs a novel cross-country dataset with information on firms’ senior management group and other firm characteristics, covering both publicly listed and unlisted firms in manufacturing and non-financial market services across nine OECD countries. The main result from the analysis is that productivity gains from increasing gender diversity in senior management are highest among firms with low initial diversity. Increasing the female share to the sample average of 20% in firms with initially lower shares would increase aggregate productivity by around 0.6%. This suggests that improving women’s access to senior management positions matters not only for equity but could yield significant productivity gains.

Education plays an important role in ensuring that women and men have the same opportunities in their personal and professional lives, through formal schooling, shaping attitudes and transforming behaviours. Yet old stereotypes die hard, and gender still plays a role in a number of ways. This Spotlight takes a look at the issues both in society and in the educational field itself.

Despite women’s increased participation in the labour market significantly contributing to past economic growth, persistent gender gaps across OECD labour markets hinder full realization of the potential gains of women’s economic participation. This paper analyses the economic implications of these gaps and evaluates the potential for future growth through greater gender equality in labour market outcomes. Utilising two methodological frameworks, the paper first employs growth accounting to measure the contribution of women's employment to past economic growth. The paper then uses a simplified version of the OECD Long-Term Model in conjunction with projections on future labour force dynamics to estimate the impact of greater gender equality on the labour market. These analyses provide insight into the potentially significant economic benefits of closing persistent gender gaps across OECD countries.

Historically across the OECD, the teaching profession has been largely dominated by women. The share of female teachers has been increasing over the past decade – reaching 68% in 2014 for all levels of education combined. The gender disparity decreases gradually with the level of education, from 97% of women in pre-primary education to 43% in tertiary education. Between 2005 and 2014, the gender gap increased at the primary and secondary levels, but decreased at the tertiary level.

Public finances will be under increasing pressure in the medium term. Tools such as spending review, which help governments prioritise and reallocate spending, are likely to be increasingly important. Integrating a gender perspective will ensure that budget reprioritisation does not increase gender gaps, but instead supports the achievement of gender goals – which can bring economic and fiscal dividends. This paper highlights the different ways in which countries are experimenting with integrating a gender perspective to spending review, as well as some of the key considerations that should be taken into account in the process.

Responding to the gender impacts of COVID-19 – including lost economic opportunities when taking on more domestic and care work in the health sector and at home, and increased violence – requires more tailored policies and resources that support gender equality and women’s empowerment. It also means including women in leadership and decision making in all aspects of the recovery. Official development assistance (ODA) is key to improved gender analysis by donors and development partners, and the broader application of gender-responsive budgeting tools across public finance management (PFM) systems. This paper provides recommendations to better align ODA to gender-sensitive responses in the disbursement of COVID-19 relief and recovery funds, and considers how PFM systems should be strengthened by donors and partner countries to provide for gender-sensitive recoveries.

Gene editing aims to modify the genetic sequence at a precise genomic location. Recent breakthroughs in gene editing techniques such as the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) system have ushered in a new era for gene editing and health innovation. The purpose of the Expert Meeting (6-7 July 2017, Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Berlin, Germany) was to explore the core scientific, legal, regulatory and societal challenges facing the responsible development and use of gene editing in somatic cells for advanced therapies. Experts noted that the trajectory of gene editing in research and development and the uptake of future therapies in the clinical setting remain unclear due to uncertainties in the scientific, regulatory, and economic landscapes. Many policy issues are also raised in the context of other emerging technologies. Governance must cope with a moving technical frontier and some level of uncertainty around risks and benefits.

Gene editing techniques represent a major advance in the field of biotechnological research and application, promising significant benefits across the domains of human health, sustainability and the economy. There is broad agreement that gene editing techniques go beyond incremental advances of past biotechnologies. However, harnessing the potential of gene editing techniques will require meeting significant policy challenges in arenas of governance, ethics, and public engagement. This report summarises the discussions of a group of international experts of science, technology and policy, as well as policymakers at a dedicated workshop entitled “Gene editing in an international context: scientific, economic and social issues across sectors” in Ottawa, Canada on 29-30 September 2016.