Petra Sevcikova is a Project Manager in the Sustainable and Societal Transitions Department at AFNOR Normalisation. She also leads the international committee that developed the first ISO standard offering guidelines to help companies and other organizations implement gender equality.
The French standardization commission on Gender Equality, created at the end of 2021, proposed in December 2021 the working draft that serves as the foundation for the future international standard. This project unfolds in two stages. First, a French framework (AFNOR SPEC) was developed with French stakeholders. This framework was then promoted by France at the international level, placing the country at the forefront of international standardization on gender equality.
Gender equality is one of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5), adopted in 2015 to eradicate poverty, protect the planet, and ensure that all people live in peace and prosperity by 2030. Although significant progress has been made in gender equality over the past few decades, the world is still not on track to fully achieve this by 2030. The situation for women’s and girls’ rights worsened during the COVID-19 crisis. This motivated the members of the French commission and the participants from all ISO national members involved in the ISO committee to develop international measures together.
Standardization complements existing documents and strengthens measures to limit and combat violence and vulnerabilities against women and girls. This French initiative aimed to provide a cross-cutting response, raise awareness, and collectively advance the challenges of gender equality.
The goal was to share reflections and best practices identified internationally and work together with participants from standardization bodies worldwide who chose to engage in ISO. It is a genuinely participatory, representative, and consensus-driven process to ensure that the drafted recommendations can be implemented by a wide variety of organizations and companies, in diverse and constantly evolving international contexts.
Specifically, the title of the ISO 53800 standard is “Guidelines for promoting and implementing gender equality and women’s empowerment.” The authors acknowledge the existence of other gender identities, but the collective decision was to focus on the inequalities caused by the hierarchical assignment of gender roles to men and women, given their deeply structuring influence in society.
The gender equality and women’s empowerment standard is a voluntary framework that offers a methodological reference, guidelines, definitions, procedures, and tools to both public and private organizations, internally and in their activities. Regardless of their size, location, or field, the goal is to guide them toward making sustainable progress in promoting and implementing gender equality.
The document outlines steps for assessing the level of (in)equality within organizations, addressing several crucial topics such as improving women’s leadership in companies and roundtables, establishing good remote working practices, and considering gender-sensitive budgeting (“gender budgeting”).
Meeting with international stakeholders on the ISO standard.
The standard is the result of long discussions between international stakeholders, reaching a consensus within the ISO working group. Its development provided an opportunity to engage with members from countries across all continents. It is a flexible, readable, and usable document for all organizations.
By applying the methodology and recommendations of this standard, a company or organization equips itself to implement a competent strategy, as this standard is created by experts in this field from around the world.
Companies, organizations, or municipalities demand concrete and operational elements.With this standard, they are provided with an operational methodology that includes several steps. The strength of this standard is its adaptability to all situations and levels of maturity on the subject of gender equality in companies and organizations.
Thus, organizations unsure of how to approach gender equality, starting from scratch, will find in the standard an action plan and methodology to help implement measures.
On the other hand, organizations already advanced in the matter, having already implemented action plans, will find practical and pragmatic points to go even further and continue making progress.
The standard provides concrete examples and best practices that allow an organization to quickly become operational.
First, the organization can obtain an overview of the current state of gender equality within itself using the standard. It can also involve its relevant partners in making progress towards more equality and identify the obstacles and opportunities in achieving this. The standard helps the organization set up a prevention system, detect and respond to gender-based violence, and, most importantly, improve the internal situation by implementing action plans and establishing or reinforcing best practices.
Annex C of the standard contains good practices and concrete examples from around the world. For greater equality, companies can, for example:
