The Fourth Green Growth Knowledge Platform (GGKP) Annual Conference will focus on the theme of “Transforming Development through Inclusive Green Growth” during 6-7 September 2016 at the International Convention Center on Jeju Island, Republic of Korea.
Bipasha Baruah will be presenting her paper "Creating Opportunities For Women in The Renewable Energy Sector" at the Fourth GGKP Annual Conference during the session on "Ensuring Gender-Balanced Participation and Empowerment".
1. Briefly describe the topic and conclusion of your paper.
Through empirical research conducted in India, this paper identifies opportunities and constraints women face in accessing employment in the renewable energy sector. Discussions about women and energy are not new. Most research in the social sciences has stressed the importance of energy access in improving poor women’s lives in developing countries. Previous research has focused on women mostly as end users of technology whereas my research attempts to also understand women’s potential as entrepreneurs, facilitators, designers and innovators in the energy sector.
Other social scientists studying the gender distribution of global employment patterns have pointed out that historically and at the present time, the technology workforce represents a vertically and horizontally gender-stratified labor market, with women concentrated in the lowest-paid positions, closest to the most menial and tedious components and furthest from the creative design of technology and the authority of management or policymaking. Findings from my research suggest that a similar destiny will fulfill itself in the renewable energy sector if we do not explicitly and proactively address issues of gender equity at all levels.
2. Through your research, what do you find as the role for inclusiveness in the transition to a green economy?
Concerns about climate change and fossil fuel insecurity have convinced many countries to transition to low-carbon energy supplies derived from renewables such as solar, bioenergy and wind. Since producing and distributing renewables is more labor-intensive than producing and distributing fossil fuels, this shift is creating new employment opportunities. Applying a gender lens to the enthusiasm for renewables, however, reveals a major blind spot. Women are underrepresented globally in employment in the renewable energy sector, constituting less than 6 per cent of technical staff and below 1 per cent of top managers. In the absence of appropriately targeted training, education, apprenticeships, employment placement, financial tools and supportive social policies, transitioning to renewables may exacerbate existing gender inequities and compromise global human development goals.
3. What are the key policy implications of your research?
The green economy will create 60 million new jobs around the world in the next 20 years, mainly in technology and infrastructure. Forty percent of green employment will be linked to investments in renewable energy – wind power, solar, biomass, small-scale hydropower and geothermal. That there is tremendous potential to create quality employment opportunities for women is worth celebrating but it is also important not to exaggerate the ability of green technologies to reduce gender inequality in the absence of other supportive social and economic policies and political awareness-raising about gender equality. Innovations and employment in other industries - electronics and information technology are good examples - have not led to overall restructuring of established gender divisions of labor or unequal gender relations. There is a material and an ideological basis for gender inequality and we must necessarily challenge both to create transformative differences in women’s lives.
State-level and federal initiatives aimed at improving representation and removing barriers for career advancement for women in engineering and policy making will also benefit the energy sector. Many equity and access policies adopted to promote gender equality tend to be linear and positivist. They do not seek any special privileges for women and simply demand that everyone receive consideration without discrimination on the basis of sex. They are criticized widely because they fail to address the wide range of social and institutional factors that prevent women from succeeding and also because they do not demand preferential pro-women hiring practices to correct historical and current injustices and inequalities. I would argue that even such simplistic liberal policies can improve women’s access to opportunities in sectors that are almost completely male-dominated. More comprehensive and finely-tuned policies that take structural constraints into consideration will optimize women’s performance and advancement in the energy sector. Government spending through stimulus packages and public procurement can also address gender inequality. Contractors for public agencies should be required to adopt affirmative action goals to correct the under-representation of women in their workforce. Green stimulus spending should come with conditional requirements for the recruitment and retention of women.
4. What do you hope to gain from the Fourth GGKP Annual Conference?
I am interested generally in learning more about green initiatives around the world (particularly in energy and transportation). More specifically, I am interested in learning about concrete strategies and promising practices being taken up around the world to promote employment equity and social justice in the green economy.
5. Which session at the conference are you interested in attending and why?
I am interested in attending sessions that focus on both growth and equity, for example, Managing Distributional Impacts from Green Growth Transitions, Exploring the Climate Change and Poverty Nexus, Ensuring Gender Balanced Participation and Empowerment, and Promoting Green Cities.
6. What are the next steps for your research?
I am working on generating a global baseline data set and analysis of women’s employment in renewable energy. This project identifies similarities and differences in occupational patterns in women’s employment in renewables in different world regional contexts, and makes recommendations for optimizing women’s participation in the sector. I have assembled, synthesized and analyzed primary and secondary data on women’s employment in the renewable energy sector in OECD countries, emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), the Middle East and North Africa, and developing nations in Asia and Africa. Findings from this research will enable the formulation of programs and policies to ensure that livelihoods in renewable energy become more accessible for women. I hope that the issues identified by my research will also provide the grounding and detail against which other related issues and research, perhaps using very different methodologies, can be tested, verified and advanced.