Fostering Men’s Engagement to Support Gender Equality

USAID Engendering Industries (EI) is a global program that supports organizations in male-dominated industries to increase economic opportunities for women and improve gender equality in the workplace. It has prioritized CLA and focused on developing a technical evidence base to identify the most effective approaches for enhancing gender equality across the employee life cycle.

Through iterative consultations with the program’s global partners, EI identified men’s engagement as a critical component for advancing gender equality and then partnered with Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice to design tools and methodologies to foster men’s allyship and active engagement on gender equality. This program component deepened and complemented Engendering Industries’ existing training programs in which partner companies develop and implement corporate gender equality action plans. The EI and Equimundo team drew on formative research, input from partners, and evidence-based approaches to develop a training manual, which was tested and refined in a five-day training-of-trainers (ToT) to engage men for gender equality in the workplace.

After each training, a Lessons Learned session as facilitated. During these sessions, assessment data was reviewed, and lessons learned were applied to future iterations of the training methodology and manual. The program theory of change was updated to fully integrate men’s engagement based on reflections made possible by continuously gathering feedback from stakeholders at each touchpoint.

As a result of applying a CLA approach, fostering men’s engagement to support gender equality throughout the employee life cycle framework is now a core pillar of the USAID Engendering Industries’ multi-faceted, proven approach for enhancing gender equality in the workplace.