Closing the Gender Gap Buenos Aires with PARES

Buenos Aires has applied a gender lens to their urban planning since the 1989. More recently, the city has rolled out a unique indicator system, El Sistema de Indicadores de Género BA (SIGBA), which measures physical safety, economic autonomy, and decision-making powers to understand the state of gender equity in the city. In place since 2017, this tool has helped local officials develop a clearer understanding of gaps and challenges for their female residents, and advance women’s rights through public policy. This information is used across the municipal government, and feeds into the three strategic goals of the Secretary for  Gender Equality : i) tackling violence against women and girls, ii) caregiving, and iii) economic autonomy. A public-private program, PARES, has since been developed to support the latter of the three.

PARES seeks to promote the role of women in the labor market by helping companies and organisations increase the number of women in their ranks, reduce their gender pay gap, promote women into decision making roles, and instill a healthy work-life balance. Drawing from the success of SIGBA, PARES shares essential data with companies, like a gender gap diagnosis, to help them understand what they need to address in order to become a more equitable workplace. PARES then offers a full suite of support and incentives ranging from the development of a gender equity action plan, training, exchanges between companies, progress reports and public positioning.

In her presentation at the 2022 CHANGE annual summit, Lara Jedwabny, Adviser for International Affairs in the Secretary for Gender Equality, explains how PARES works and why 80 companies have already signed up for this exciting program, and nearly 100 more are expected to join.