“Women's climate leadership isn't just important,” says Nathyeli Acuna Castillo, Gender Specialist at the World Bank. “It’s the secret ingredient for successful climate finance.”
It’s a bold statement to make, especially given the levels of inequality in today’s world. Four in five workers in the energy sector worldwide are men. So are four in five landholders, despite nearly half of the world's agricultural workforce being women1. Only 1.5% of climate-related development assistance goes to projects that focus on gender equality, and just 15% of ministers responsible for the environment are women.
Why does it make sense to challenge this, starting immediately? Here are three compelling reasons – along with the evidence for each.
1. Women’s leadership means better results
Getting more women into leadership roles is not only the right thing to do, it’s also highly effective. Studies have shown that companies with more women in their management teams and on their boards earn higher profits and are more likely to support pro-environmental actions.
“A decade of evidence tells us that when men and women are together in a room making decisions, those decisions are better,” explains Franziska Denninger, Climate Lead for the Gender and Economic Inclusion Department of the International Finance Corporation (IFC). “The same principle applies both to climate corporate governance and big decision-making in the private sector.”
That’s why, for example, CIF’s groundbreaking Dedicated Grant Mechanism not only directly finances many women-led projects, but five of the nine voting positions in the Global Steering Committee and 24 percent of the seats on the national steering committees are held by women. CIF has also launched a first-of-its-kind initiative, the Women-Led Coal Transitions mechanism, to test bold and innovative “business unusual” models that ensure women’s voices are heard and acted upon within transition plans.
“We need more women leaders at all levels,” says Nina Kolybashkina, Senior Social Development Specialist with CIF. “We need them as employees in technical and management positions in the private sector, and as investors, land owners, entrepreneurs, and local labor union leaders. And we need them in the public sector – from local community groups and water user associations to decision makers at ministerial level and within climate negotiations.”
Failing to dismantle the structures shutting women out diminishes the quality of our leadership, right at the time we most need it.
2. The energy sector desperately needs more skilled workers
It is estimated that the green economy can create 24 million jobs worldwide by 2030.
Women have to date been poorly represented in the energy sector, with the picture only worsening for technical and management positions: the latest figures from the International Energy Agency show that just 13.9% of senior roles are held by women.
But if the structural barriers shutting them out can be dismantled, we can unlock the skills needed to accelerate coal transitions, integrate renewable energy, and decarbonize industry.
“The energy transition needs millions of green jobs,” says Acuna Castillo. “We still need to fill them. This is a key opportunity for women to be hired and promoted in the sector.”
CIF and our partners have already begun embedding this approach into our projects. Under our Clean Technology Fund, to give just one example, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) provided low-cost loans in Brazil and Mexico to energy companies that committed to measures to attract more women to the male-dominated sector, including equal pay, sexual harassment prevention policies, and paternity leave. In Colombia, supported by CIF’s Renewable Energy Integration Program, the IDB is working closely with the government to increase the number of women within the traditionally male-dominated energy sector. “By offering training programs tailored to women, focusing on technical skills relevant to clean energy, hydrogen production and conversion, storage, sustainability and financial market opportunities,” says Mariana Alfonso, lead climate change specialist at the IDB, “we expect to increase the representation of females in the sector's technical and managerial positions.”
“Over the years, I've seen the central and increasingly visible role of women leadership in climate finance, particularly in Africa,” says Camille Quenard, gender expert for the Climate Finance Division of the African Development Bank. She highlights the CIF Women in Coal Transition Initiative, which supports women in South Africa to transition from a coal-based to a green economy, through skills development, micro-finance and entrepreneurship schemes.
And in Saint Lucia, as part of a World Bank project exploring the country's geothermal potential, we are funding scholarships, internships and apprenticeships for women interested in technical careers in green energy.
3. Women are the champions of local knowledge
Climate change, like poverty, hits women and girls the hardest. In many societies, women are responsible for fetching water or firewood, which can become impossible in conditions of drought and flooding. Women produce up to 80 per cent of food in developing countries. And when crops fail or extreme weather events strike, women are more likely to be displaced, die, or suffer from violence.
The flip side of this is that women are indispensable sources of information when making decisions about climate action, such as how to help communities overcome increasingly dry conditions or to protect themselves against devastating floods.
And when women lead local responses to climate change, the outcomes are clear: better resource management; improved disaster readiness; and better conservation of natural resources.
“Women are at the forefront of the use and management of natural resources,” says Sihem Gadj Ameur, from Tunisia's Ministry of Agriculture, who credits the involvement of women in the successful roll-out of forest protection initiatives, including those supported through CIF’s Forest Investment Program. “In Tunisia we have 1.3 million hectares of forests inhabited by 1 million people, and 80 per cent of workers in these forests are women.”
Many of CIF’s projects encompass measures to include women in decision-making, such as our Pilot Program for Climate Resilience project with the ADB in Cambodia, which has successfully boosted women’s representation in village-level disaster management groups and water committees. In Niger, an IFC project funded by CIF found that 60% of the farmers buying small-scale irrigation systems through the project were women, demonstrating how important women are when scaling up climate technologies and climate finance at the local level.
In North Macedonia, CIF and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) are working jointly on a just transition platform. The goal is not just to enable the country to move away from polluting industries and embrace renewable energy, explains Barbara Ramusack of the EBRD, “but also to ensure that people and livelihoods are protected – and that women, again, have an important role in shaping those decisions, the policy and the investment side.”
Asking the right questions
While more and more women are forming coalitions, leading initiatives, and heading up organizations, stubborn blockages remain. Women are still paid less, receive less promotions, and occupy fewer leadership roles.
These collective lessons have given rise to a new Women Climate Leadership Initiative, and an easy-to-use diagnostic tool. Grounded in extensive deliberations with gender experts and civil society representatives, this tool helps project planners to take a transformative approach to gender, by posing three pivotal questions:
• Where are women missing from leadership, in government, the private sector and civil society?
• What’s keeping women out of these senior roles?
• What can be done to change this?
The last question is particularly powerful, as it opens the door to rapid, actionable steps. Proven interventions include requiring that women are involved in planning and monitoring climate activities, introducing policies that prohibit workplace discrimination, pushing for reform of inheritance laws, targeting women directly for climate resilience loans and technologies, or running public campaigns that challenge unfair or dangerous beliefs about women – and of course, channeling funding directly to women’s organizations and networks.
More and more countries are recognizing that a successful and just energy transition hinges on women’s full participation. The percentage of nationally determined contributions with at least one mention of gender has now reached 78 percent, and according to the 2022 SDG Gender Index, over half of all countries have made at least “some” progress in increasing women’s participation in climate change leadership.
These changes mark the beginning of a tipping point. Transforming our energy sectors means unleashing new ideas, gathering new perspectives, and skilling new staff. Closing the gaps in women’s leadership will help us get there.