5 ways to make gender transformation at work a reality

If you are a woman at work, the chances are you already know the feeling. You work as hard as the man next to you, and earn less. You take on more at home, and get penalized for it at work. You speak up in a meeting, and get talked over.

Gender inequality at work is not accidental. It is built into structures, who makes the rules, who they were designed for, and who gets left out. Changing that is what gender transformation means. Here are five ways to make it happen.

1. Recognize that "treating everyone the same" is not the same as equality

Most workplaces would say they treat men and women equally. But equal treatment is not the same as equal outcomes, especially when the rules were written with one group in mind.

Take safety equipment. For decades, protective gear was designed for the average male body. Women had to make do with a kit that did not fit and faced higher injury rates as a result. The rule was "the same" for everyone. The outcome was not.

Gender transformation means going further than acknowledging this problem. It means changing the rules themselves, involving women in writing them, challenging assumptions about who certain jobs are for and making sure safety, pay and promotion systems work for everyone.

A good test for any workplace policy: who was this designed for, and who does it leave out?

2. Count the work that nobody counts

Before and after the paid working day, most women work a second shift. Cooking, cleaning, raising children, caring for elderly parents, work that keeps families and communities going, but that does not appear in any payslip or GDP figure.

Globally, women do 76.2 per cent of all unpaid care work, more than three times as much as men, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). An estimated 708 million women are outside the paid workforce entirely because of care responsibilities, compared to 40 million men. At the current pace of change, the ILO calculates it will take 210 years to close that gap.

This matters for workers because care responsibilities follow women into the workplace, shaping which jobs they can take, which hours they can work and how far they can progress. Real gender equality means recognizing this work, redistributing it more fairly and building workplaces that account for it: through parental leave that fathers actually use, affordable childcare and flexible working that does not derail careers.

3. Close the pay gap and make employers prove they have

Women earn around 20 per cent less than men globally. The United Nations puts it plainly: for every dollar a man earns, a woman earns 77 cents, for work of equal value. Mothers are hit hardest: wages fall with each additional child, while fathers often see theirs rise.

Part of the gap comes from outright discrimination. But much of it reflects something deeper: jobs done mainly by women are valued less than equivalent jobs done mainly by men. A care worker earns a fraction of what a security guard earns, despite comparable skills and responsibility.

Closing the gap starts with making it visible. Employers should be required to publish salary data broken down by gender and role, so that gaps cannot be hidden. Workers and unions can then use that data to challenge unfair pay, in negotiations, in the courts and in public. IndustriALL's Pay Equity Toolkit is a free, practical guide developed specifically to help trade unions tackle the gender pay gap, from raising awareness to negotiating pay transparency with employers.

4. Change the institution, not just the rules

Policies only go so far. Lasting change requires changing the culture of organizations, including trade unions themselves. As Professor Akua Opokua Britwum, one of Africa's leading feminist scholars, has argued at IndustriALL's women's committee meeting in Cape Town, June 2023:

"you could put 100 per cent women in union leadership and still have a union that fails women workers, if the structures and culture remain unchanged."

IF Metall, the Swedish metalworkers' union, wrote feminist principles into its founding statutes, the French union CGTintroduced equal gender representation on its leadership committee in 1999. ELA in Spain ran an anonymous survey across its entire membership in 2017 asking honest questions about discrimination and bias within the union itself, 95 per cent of members responded. The results were uncomfortable. They acted on them anyway.

Men are part of this too. A workplace that expects women to carry all the care at home, and all the advocacy for equality at work, is not a feminist workplace, it is an exhausted one. Unions and employers that have engaged men directly, through training, through honest conversations about how gender norms harm men too, have made more lasting progress.

5. Know your rights and demand they are enforced

Workers have more rights than many realize, and those rights exist because previous generations fought for them. On gender equality at work, some of the most important protections come from international standards set by the ILO.

The Violence and Harassment Convention (C190) establishes that every worker has the right to a workplace free from violence and harassment, including gender-based violence. The Equal Remuneration Convention (C100) sets out the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. These are not aspirational goals, they are binding standards in countries that have ratified them.

The problem is often enforcement. Rights on paper mean little without pressure to implement them. That pressure comes from organized workers, in unions, in campaigns and in workplaces. IndustriALL has developed a train the trainers toolkit on C190, available in more than a dozen languages, to help affiliates put the convention into practice.

IndustriALL's 2025 feminist resolution, adopted by IndustriALL affiliates, sets out a full agenda: from equal pay and safe workplaces to care work, climate justice and the fight against rising authoritarianism. It makes clear that gender justice is not a side issue for the labour movement. It is the labour movement."

"Gender transformation will not come without a fight. The tools, the frameworks and the solidarity are there. The question is whether we use them with determination and shared purpose," said Chirstina Olivier, IndustriALL assistant general secretary.