Breaking Boundaries: Gender Equality in the Workplace by signing the WEPs

In collaboration with UN Women Pakistan, CERB hosted two practitioner workshops on the 23rd October, in Islamabad and on the 15th November in Lahore, titled “Breaking Boundaries, Gender Equality in the workplace”. A total of thirty-six companies and forty participants attended the two workshops.

The workshops main focus was to help identify the barriers and challenges that exist for women and their employers and then also identify recommendations and strategies that can enhance women’s employment opportunities in the private sector. The UN Women also presented the WEPs which can be used as a tool in advancing the agenda of Gender Equality at the workplace.

The Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) provide a seven steps guide for the business community on how they can assist women in the workplace, community and marketplace. The Principles emphasize the business case for promoting Gender Equality and how companies stand to benefit by being Champions for gender. The UN Women and UN Global Compact are working together to push the agenda of Women’s Empowerment Principles which enables and empowers women to participate fully in all sectors of economic activity.

At both workshops, WEP signatories such as WeRplay, Jazz, Forward Sports and Nestle presented their good gender practices and their journey from having signed WEPs till date. This gave other participating companies an opportunity to learn from their experiences on how to make a more gender inclusive workplace environment.

Being a WEP signatory will help companies uphold strong gender performance and will naturally increase their ability to attract, recruit and retain top talent, females and males both. Furthermore, it will also help them uphold decent working standards within their company to support all their employees equally. As a signatory, companies will get a platform to share and scale their good gender practices and communicating their progress through sex disaggregated data and other benchmarks will also provide them with a transparent system.