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.
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.
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
Give and receive
Experience
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.
Throughout the program, participants will address the following questions: