This study exposes failure to factor in gender in COVID-19 education responses and widening gaps in access to quality education following school closures. Citing some 90 countries, the study shows that despite governments' and partners’ swift responses to school closures, remote learning strategies in most countries failed to account for gender-based considerations and barriers that children face at home.

This report focuses on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and presents findings drawn from the narratives of over 150 young female STEM professionals in seven countries. The report showcases how confidence in their own abilities helps women deal with setbacks. At the same time, the report highlights the critical role that support from parents, mentors, and partners play in women’s success in STEM. Finally, the report concludes that even where training and hiring environments support women in STEM careers, discrimination in day-to-day delivery remains a challenge.

This Note builds on research covering the three countries with the highest concentration of Syrian refugees displaced since 2011: Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. It is intended to inform policymakers and practitioners on the barriers that Syrian refugees, especially women, face in securing work to earn a livelihood. This Note highlights initiatives designed to address those barriers, but does not enumerate all of them. While not specifically addressing internally-displaced persons (IDPs) within Syria, this Note could serve as a blueprint for examining and addressing many of the same barriers women face in Syria.

This report brings together the voices and experiences of over 14,000 girls across many continents. It aims at uncovering and understanding their experiences being online: what platforms they use, what is their experience of harassment, who are the perpetrators and the impact of harassment on them.

Young women in Africa are less likely to be employed than young men, as a result of gaps in access to resources such as skills, time, and capital, and due to underlying social norms. Adolescence is a particularly critical time to intervene, as teenage pregnancy or dropping out of school can have severe impacts on future employment and earnings with significant consequences on their lives. At the macroeconomic level, investing in adolescent girls is also crucial for Sub-Saharan Africa`s demographic dividend.

This report places the notion of social inclusion in an analysis of Africa’s achievements and challenges. Its interdisciplinary approach uses evidence to bring empirical weight to issues that are often debated through advocacy and contestation. It also contributes to the priority areas of a new regional strategy for the Africa region of the World Bank by focusing on women’s empowerment, digital technology, fragility, and climate change, among others.

This Jobs Solutions Note identifies practical solutions for development practitioners to proactively integrate gender inclusion in digital jobs programs. Based on curated knowledge and evidence for a specific topic and relevant to jobs, the Jobs Solutions Notes are not intended to be exhaustive; they provide key lessons, solutions and approaches synthesized from the experiences of the World Bank Group and partners. This Note draws from S4YE’s 2018 annual report, Digital Jobs for Youth: Young Women in the Digital Economy, highlighting new and emerging strategies to designing gender-inclusive digital jobs interventions for youth. The Note employs a nuanced definition of “digital jobs” to enable practitioners and policy makers to develop a range of interventions tailored to specific contexts and target groups, to improve young women’s employment outcomes from digital jobs programs.

This brief examines how the World Bank’s ‘Gaza Emergency Cash for Work and Self-Employment Support’ project supports NGOs that are connecting unemployed youth with online work opportunities. The project will help fund skills training and digital job support to 750 youth (including 375 young women). The brief highlights challenges facing young women in the West Bank and Gaza – who experience high unemployment rates – and the strategies used to encourage their program participation and empower them to engage in e-work.

This brief examines how the World Bank’s ‘E-Commerce for Women-Led SMEs’ project addresses the constraints faced by small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) run or managed by women operating in Algeria; Djibouti, the Arab Republic of Egypt; Jordan; Lebanon; Morocco; and Tunisia. It highlights how the World Bank seeks to support women-led SMEs (WSMEs) in the Middle East North Africa region (MENA) in accessing global markets through e-commerce platforms, and the strategies used to help WSMEs access financial resources, develop capacity, and increase sales.

This toolkit provides advice for young women who could become digital professionals and employers struggling to fill the job openings in their companies. The focus is on young women that are
Not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEETs) – hence they face various risks, problems, and negative orientations. 
 

This manual guides business development practitioners, the donor community, and other developmental experts wishing to implement an intervention to support and strengthen women growth-oriented entrepreneurs. It is specifically geared to practitioners wishing to improve their understanding of challenges specific to women entrepreneurs and practical ways of addressing these.

Using data collected from microenterprises in Gaborone, Botswana, this paper finds that women who cross over into male dominated sectors make higher profits and grow larger firms in terms of number of employees compared to women who operate businesses in female-concentrated sectors.

UN Women has developed Empowering Women Migrant Workers from South Asia: Toolkit for Gender-Responsive Employment and Recruitment. The Toolkit provides guidance on ensuring the protection and promotion of the rights of women migrant workers throughout the labour migration cycle.

This note analyses the gender profile of youth not in employment, education, or training (NEETs) in Georgia and Armenia according to individual and household characteristics, the gender differences in the school-to-work pathways, and the characteristics or risk factors that are correlated to being NEET and their differential effect between men and women.

The data book illustrates the progress towards gender equality for 217 economies around the world. It provides comparable statistics for women and men for the years 2000 and 2017 across a range of indicators covering education, health, and related services, economic structure, participation and access to resources, public life and decision making, and agency. 

To gain new insight into how women’s employment and entrepreneurship choices are affected by legal gender discrimination, this study examines ten years of Women, Business and the Law data through an index structured around the economic decisions women make as they go through different stages of their working lives.

This guide provides evidence-based operational principles for teams working on women’s entrepreneurship, including resources to build the business case for supporting women-owned businesses and start-ups; to develop a framework for support programs for women-owned businesses, and to share insights from case studies and results.

This report provides operational recommendations for the design and implementation of gender-inclusive digital jobs interventions for youth. It develops a new typology of digital jobs and draws insights from 19 case studies based on past and ongoing employment programs that connect youth with digital jobs opportunities.

This toolkit is designed to support organizations implementing ICT sector projects to identify relevant barriers to women and provides suggested subsequent actions to overcome these barriers. It also provides targeted actions to capitalize on these opportunities.

The report explores the gender-related barriers faced by young women and young men, reviews the many approaches that programs take in Africa to confront these barriers, and tries to establish whether and how these approaches have been successful.