UNIDO International Women’s Day Celebrations Opening Speech by Mr. LI Yong, Director General, United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) Vienna International Centre, 8 March 2017

Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a great pleasure to address you all at today’s International Women’s Day Celebrations.

This year’s theme is Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by 2030. There is thus a real momentum for an issue that is at the very core of UNIDO’s mandate: to forge a gender-equal world where both women and men benefit from working in the industrial sectors. Gender equality is not only a stand-alone goal in itself, but also acknowledged in the 2030 Agenda as a driver of progress across all the Sustainable Development Goals, including Goal 9 on industry, innovation and infrastructure.

UNIDO sees women’s inclusion in the workforce as an integral part of achieving sustainable industrial development, as we recognize women to be powerful drivers for change. Studies have shown that limiting women’s inclusion in the labour market constitutes a real loss in terms of companies’ productivity, employee-retention and firm performance. While it is clear that women ought to be part of the world of paid work, between 1995 and 2015, the global female labour force participation rate actually decreased from 52.4 percent to 49.6 percent. Working conditions for women are often worse than for their male counterparts and the gender pay gap worldwide still stands at 24 per cent.

Women also often find themselves working in jobs that follow gender stereotypes, offer lower pay and provide reduced chances of career growth. All this even though women’s labour is crucial to many sectors that are critical for economic growth in emerging markets.

There is thus a lot for us to gain by achieving Planet 50-50. But how do we do this? Creating so called smart and inclusive workplaces is one way of enlarging the frame and enhancing everyone’s access to jobs. As the nature of work is changing with advancing technologies, we need to become more creative in finding solutions to generate a work/life balance where both women and men have the opportunity to grow and develop.

UNIDO will continue its efforts to ensure that women do not miss the opportunity to join a changing labour market. We have for instance developed projects that empower women and challenge gender stereotypes in the workplace. This is done in Iraq where women are part of Scania’s team working with heavy trucks, buses and engines. Through the Forestry Training Centres in South Africa, we target women for capacity-building and promote their participation in a traditionally male-dominated forestry sector.

We are also supporting talented female business owners in the MENA region, helping them to access markets and networks. Copies of a newly published UNIDO study on women entrepreneurship development in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine and Tunisia are available at the back of the room, as well as additional brochures on gender equality and trade capacity-building in Zambia and information on UNIDO’s gender equality work. I encourage everyone to read them as they contain critical recommendations for women’s inclusion in trade and investment promotion and the expansion of women-owned businesses.

Today, you will also hear from the Gender Focal Point for the Department of Trade, Investment and Innovation about how UNIDO has been contributing to promoting gender equality and increased gender parity in national quality institutions in Zambia. This is just a sample of the rich and diverse body of work that UNIDO implements to ensure women’s equal integration in the world of work. All this serves the purpose of increasing the talent pool with both women and men in order to achieve the goal of Planet 50-50 and strengthened industrial competitiveness.

Bu we cannot only preach change, we must set an example and walk-the-talk by creating a smarter working place for our own colleagues. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has made gender parity one of his priorities and has already put things in motion by having UN-wide consultations on how to achieve it by 2021. UNIDO fully supports him in his efforts and we are scrutinizing our own human resources framework to see how we can improve and create change faster.

Achieving gender parity — and therefore gender equality — goes beyond looking at human resources practices in recruitment and selection. Reaching gender parity requires creating an enabling environment and an inclusive organizational culture.

We already have a lot of the policy framework in place with the adoption of our Gender Policy and the Strategy on Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women in 2015.

One of the priority areas foreseen in the strategy is changing organizational culture to achieve gender parity. We are therefore developing new initiatives to increase the participation and representation of women, including at senior levels. In human resources management, the emphasis is being placed on clear, specific divisional targets for gender balance. We are also looking at ways to improve the recruitment, promotion, and mobility of female staff, and to create a supportive environment for them.

In 2016, UNIDO held a mandatory training on “Gender, Unconscious Biases and Organizational Culture” to sensitize management and staff on the unconscious bias and stereotyping at the individual and organizational levels that lead to gender inequalities in the workplace.

This morning we held a follow-up training for managers and gender focal points on inclusive behaviour. Tomorrow, we will organize a workshop for human resource professionals to design gender parity interventions. We are honoured to have Lisa Kepinsky, one of the world’s leading diversity coaches here for these training-workshops and also to participate in our panel this afternoon.

UNIDO strives to lead by example and visibly demonstrate our values through our efforts to create change globally. I am therefore happy to present our very distinguished panelists to further inspire us. I am sure they will help us shed light on what we can achieve by considering smart work practices and creating increased opportunities for career development.

To conclude, I would like to congratulate us all on this International Women’s Day – both women and men present here today - as gender equality is our common goal.