Being a Better Ally for Gender Equality

Without balancing every pair of the human scale, none of us can achieve sustainability goals. In order to improve the global sustainable development index, gender equality should be one of the top priorities. Gender equality is more than a lofty goal. It is critical that we have a positive impact on society by realizing all women's rights and creating new socioeconomic systems that include everyone.

While inequality faced by women was already an issue that needed to be addressed, COVID-19 has exposed critical gaps in equality that have left millions of women and girls behind, especially the most marginalized. Progress on key indicators of gender equality has slowed, and no country has yet achieved full gender equality. COVID-19 has exacerbated this lack of progress, deepening women’s poverty and increasing rates of violence. Health systems are being strained, socio-economic gaps are widening, and strategic, political, and funding priorities are shifting, all of which disproportionately affect women and girls.

Commitments to Action: Achieving Global Equality

The UN Women-led Generation Equality Forum seeks to address this issue. The Forum's aim is to achieve concrete progress on gender equality for young girls and women across generations by mobilizing governments, feminist and youth-led movements, international organizations, and the private sector.Each action tackles issues that are among the most difficult to overcome in the fight for equality, such as violence, climate change, and economic systems that disadvantage women and girls. They also identify actions that, if implemented and fully funded, can result in lasting and transformative change to ensure that women, girls and people of all genders can fully exercise their human rights everywhere.

Roadmap in the Making

By focusing on the most critical areas to achieve change for women and girls worldwide, a transformative roadmap is designed by the Generation Equality Forum Action Coalitions to get the results in the following six themes over the next five years:

1. Gender-Based Violence

2. Economic justice and rights

3. Bodily autonomy and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR)

4. Feminist action for climate justice

5. Technology and innovation for Gender Equality

6. Feminist movements and leadership

Koç Holding, being a supporter of Action Coalition on Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality, intends to play a key role to accelerate concrete progress on the Sustainable Development Goals. Some of the targets towards 2026 of the Action Coalition are as follows:

• Cut the gender digital divide across generations by half through accelerating access to digital technologies and achieving universal digital literacy

• Support women’s leadership as innovators and better respond to women and girls’ most pressing needs

• Ramp up investments in technology and innovation by 50%

• Double the proportion of women working in technology and innovation by establishing new networks and benchmarks to transform innovation ecosystems

• Enact policies and solutions to combat gender-based violence and discrimination facilitated by online and technological means.

Arçelik, being a supporter of the Action Coalition on Technology and Innovation for Gender Equality commits to achieve some important objectives in scope of its diversity and inclusion roadmap in line with the SDGs. The company will revisit the existing 2030 gender-based targets and expand the scope where relevant and possible, and set new STEM-related targets for 2026. Being a part of the Generation Equality Forum will bring Arçelik social value generation, a link internal strategies and goals to the larger global agenda and additional support to its SDG roadmap towards 2030.

By getting involved with such a worthwhile cause, Arçelik will be able to contribute to closing the gender gap in both the public and private sectors.