Health and Economic Well-being: Gender Equity in Post-Pandemic Rebuilding

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a gendered impact: women have faced disproportionate job loss, declines in labor-force participation, and increased caregiving responsibilities. Women working low-wage, shift jobs – who are most marginalized and vulnerable – have been hit the hardest. The recovery offers an unprecedented opportunity to rethink, reset, and rebuild. Centering gender equity creates a future more inclusive, equitable, and healthier for all.

Current COVID-19 recovery efforts cast a range of scenarios for the future of health and well-being of individuals, families, communities, and economies. These recovery responses bring an important opportunity to place health, wellbeing and equity at the center of the future of work. Ensuring access to
decent work and caregiving support is a powerful generator of upstream determinants of health.

Equitable, decent work opportunities for women – ones that deliver stable and fair income, security in the workplace, social protection for families, prospects for personal development and social inclusion, and freedom to express concerns and participate in decision making – are pathways for catalyzing wholescale change for health in communities. Pay transparency and equity, parental leave schemes, caregiving supports, work-life balance, and diversity and inclusion efforts are just some of the specific strategies for transforming work conditions. These employment conditions play a critical role not only on the health and wellbeing of women – particularly those who are historically marginalized and most vulnerable – but also their families in a variety of health dimensions, such as nutrition, weight, wellbeing, mental health and epigenetics.

As part of Salzburg Global Seminar’s long-running Health and Health Care Innovation series, this program will offer an open, international exchange of both public and private sector interventions and policies that have proven to or promise to improve health and wellbeing through gender equity in the economy, work and workplace. It will explore what it looks like to place the health and economic well-being of women at the center of COVID-19 recovery, with a focus on economic participation, opportunity and inclusion, and working conditions and culture.

Date

Oct 17 - Oct 22, 2022

Session no.

S746-01

Location

HYBRID PROGRAM

Contact

Mary Helen Pombo

Director, Health

Charlotte Müer

Program Manager, Health, Salzburg Global Seminar, Austria

Content overview

PROGRAM GOALS PROGRAM INFORMATION PROGRAM GOALS Co-curators Participants Media Partners Partner

PROGRAM GOALS

Foster collaborative leadership across ecosystems by building a dynamic and pragmatic network of people and knowledge who are driving change for health and wellbeing through gender equity.
Exchange and compile concrete, practical approaches, innovative tools, policy responses and opportunities for improving health and gender equity in the economy, work and the workplace.
Collectively distill insight from existing approaches, capture lessons learned and experiential knowledge to recalibrate initiatives for accelerating a healthy, equitable recovery and future.
Foster a “possibility mindset”, spur new thinking and develop ongoing networking and collaborations among participants and the institutions they represent.
Leverage collective knowledge to seed innovative approaches, and support fellow to navigate challenges and change through collaborative problemsolving.
Co-create action plans designed and agreed by participants for them to take forward as appropriate at community, city, or national levels and leverage the program’s global scope to influence public or private-sector policies, programs, practices or public opinion.
Promote the dissemination of program learnings and insights across various platforms, partnership, Salzburg Global’s network and other programs, and participant-suggested communication channels.

PROGRAM INFORMATION

PROGRAM FORMAT

This highly interactive hybrid program will bring together 60 participants from across the globe for two online sessions and a four-day, residential program at Schloss Leopoldskron, home of Salzburg Global Seminar, in Salzburg, Austria.

PROGRAM STRUCTURE

The hybrid program will build new insights and aggregate perspectives and experiences from relevant sectors, areas of expertise, and regions. Thematic working groups will prepare recommendations for action. As participants you can expect to:

Gain

Connection to an active international community of outstanding leaders
committed to gender equity.
Inspiration and learning from across the world and foresight into directions
for future work.
Relationships for coalition building across organizational, professional and
national boundaries.
Access to a vast network of Salzburg Global Fellows working on similar
pursuits.

Give and receive

Promising practices, and draw on the group’s collective intelligence and
experience to tackle challenges you face and leverage important opportunities.
Peer mentoring on ways to incubate, replicate, adapt and scale good practices.
Experience
A candid, safe and open exchange with peers under the Chatham House Rule.
Time and space to disconnect and reflect from a wider ecosystem perspective

Experience

A candid, safe and open exchange with peers under the Chatham House Rule.
Time and space to disconnect and reflect from a wider ecosystem perspective.

PARTICIPANT PROFILE

Salzburg Global Seminar’s Health and Health Care Innovation programs bring together cross-sector and cross-generational change-makers to tackle complex challenges. This program will involve innovators and stakeholders from around the world who have engaged or can influence citizens, communities, organizations and policymakers to ensure gender equity.

For this program, teams of four to five Fellows will be selected from diverse countries. Each team will be drawn from sectors representing actors and decision-makers in public, private, philanthropies, and civil society organizations.

Program participants will span perspectives from health and social care; public and social policy; the economy and labor market; federal and local government; academia; the business and service sector; gender equity actors; community-based advocacy; public health; international development and global health.

KEY QUESTIONS

Throughout the program, participants will address the following questions:

How are countries, cities and work places reimagining what the future of work could look like for women in post-pandemic recovery?
Which workplace supports (e.g., pay transparency and equity, parental leave schemes, caregiving supports, work-life balance measures and diversity and inclusion initiatives) are being advanced – and how and by whom? What new learnings and innovations are emerging? What challenges and bottlenecks are being experienced? How can these issues be overcome?
How are women who are most marginalized and vulnerable across different contexts centered in decision-making related to the issues being explored? How is the intersectionality of gender with race/ethnicity, ability, age and other factors considered, as well as the experience of those with diverse gender identities?
What are the immediate opportunities for action and collaboration across sectors and geographies?

PROGRAM GOALS

Foster collaborative leadership across ecosystems by building a dynamic and pragmatic network of people and knowledge who are driving change for health and wellbeing through gender equity.
Exchange and compile concrete, practical approaches, innovative tools, policy responses and opportunities for improving health and gender equity in the economy, work and the workplace.
Collectively distill insight from existing approaches, capture lessons learned and experiential knowledge to recalibrate initiatives for accelerating a healthy, equitable recovery and future.
Foster a “possibility mindset”, spur new thinking and develop ongoing networking and collaborations among participants and the institutions they represent.
Leverage collective knowledge to seed innovative approaches, and support fellow to navigate challenges and change through collaborative problemsolving.
Co-create action plans designed and agreed by participants for them to take forward as appropriate at community, city, or national levels and leverage the program’s global scope to influence public or private-sector policies, programs, practices or public opinion.
Promote the dissemination of program learnings and insights across various platforms, partnership, Salzburg Global’s network and other programs, and participant-suggested communication channels.