Gender equality and opportunities have great potential inside
A 2-day training aimed to highlight gender issues in greening the national industry were held on November 25-26, 2020. In the context of gender mainstreaming to the EU-funded Programme “European Union for Environment” (EU4Environment), the Training Workshop Series on Gender Sensitization in Greening the National Industry was carried out by UNIDO as a part of its work on Resource Efficient and Cleaner Production (RECP) and Circular Economy in the six countries of the Eastern Partnership region: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Republic of Moldova, Ukraine.
Ms. Tatiana Chernyavskaya, International Project Coordinator, Industrial Resource Efficiency Division, Directorate for Environment and Energy, UNIDO, delivered a welcome address and wished the participants to learn the most on the keynote topic of the training and apply this knowledge in daily work in both gender issues and RECP projects.
“The ability of a person to do his or her work well and efficiently does not depend on the gender”, – Mr. Andrii Vorfolomeiev, the RECP Centre’s Director, started his welcome address to the participants of the training. He also added “In our industry-related work, we often cooperate with women being technologists, directors and engineers and they are very skilflul in managing entire factories and supervising a large number of employees. Gender equality is the joint work of both men and women. And Ukraine does not lag behind in this issue, as gender equality and opportunities have great potential”.
The main theme of the training was to create equal opportunities for women and men, enabling them to make a full contribution to the economic, political, social and cultural life of the country and the whole world. Everyone in society has the right to develop his or her full potential regardless of gender. The coach focused the whole training over two days on this key point as well as the live dialogue with the participants.
Ms. Anna Ivaneta acted as the moderator of the training. She is the Centre’s focal point in gender issues, thus has a good understanding of gender equality and extensive experience in ensuring equality between women and men working at the RECP Centre.
Mr. Mykhailo Koriukalov, an expert on monitoring, evaluation and gender policy, was the coach of the training.
The coach started the core part of the training with announcing the following points:
– Key concepts – gender and sex, discrimination, equal rights, equal opportunities, gender mainstreaming;
– Gender stereotypes and how they affect decision-making;
– Legal framework on gender – national and international;
– Key statistics and parameters on gender in the project countries;
– Gender aspects of Resource Efficient and Cleaner Production and Circular Economy.
During the practical assignment, Mr. Oleksandr Chubenko, the director of “Kremenchug Metallurgical Plant, LLC.”, informed about a problem in the region he lives in and these are the terricones occupying large areas. They are a constant source of air, water, and soil pollution and also ruin the whole panoramic picture. The women of the plant are very concerned about saving the environment, so they have united together and initiated the idea of turning the industrial landfills into green recreation area. This idea became the key case study of the second training day when the participants backed up with the coach’s support trained applying gender analysis.
Among various tasks the exercise called “24 hours per day” is worth special mentioning. After the hours spent by women for household duties had been calculated, both female and male participants were struck by the fact that those tasks and duties made in total 28-30 hours. This fact speaks for itself – there is no fair balance in our families, obviously men spend less hours comparative to women and this is the challenge and we have to find the ways to fix it.
It should also be noted that the training also informed about the adoption of the EU’s new Action Plan on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in External Action 2021–2025 (GAP III) aims to accelerate progress on empowering women and girls, and safeguard gains made on gender equality during the 25 years since the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and its Platform for Action. More information here.
The coach successfully combined his PPTs and active interaction with the audience during this intensive training. He raised seemingly simple questions, but they were quite stimulating to think and respond quickly. The participants showed big interest and were free to share their views and life experience, as well as commented other replies.
The comments of the participants sometimes coincided and sometimes were quite opposite, but the unifying thesis was about stereotypical thinking still dominating in our heads – we often repeat stereotypical behavioral patterns, which foundation is about different and far from equal status of women and men in the family, at work, and in society. The eradication of this phenomenon must be reached and the whole society must move towards gender equality, when a person’s gender is not an obstacle to equal work, services, salaries and so on.
In conclusion, Mr. Mykhailo Koriukalov encouraged participants to find a gender perspective in their activities and put efforts to become more gender sensitive.
28 participants (57% women) took part in the 2-day training workshop.
* The training was organized within the frame of EU4Environment Programme funded by the European Union and implemented by a consortium of international partners, including OECD, UNIDO, UN Environment, UNECE and the World Bank.
