%20LOGO%20-%20REGISTERED%20TRADEMARK.png)
Beyond the Boardroom: Applying WEPs to Green Jobs, Fair Pay & Climate Workforce Equity
- Apr 15
- 6 min read
To make the green transition truly sustainable, companies must go beyond carbon metrics—embedding gender equity and fair labor practices into the very heart of the climate workforce.
Listen to this and other articles from The SustainabilityX® Magazine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.
CALL FOR NOMINATIONS! The SustainabilityX® Magazine Global 50 Women In Sustainability Awards™ 2025 nominations are now open - nominate a female trailblazer!
Transitioning to a sustainability-related career and looking for educational skills development? Enroll in exclusive courses or develop new skills via our educational resources section!
Become a subscribing member to help support small, high-impact, non-profit, independent publications like us for more important reads!
Summary
As the green economy rapidly expands, gender and labor equity remain critical blind spots. This article explores how organizations can apply the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) to embed justice and inclusivity into their sustainability workforce—ensuring the green transition is not only low-carbon but also fair, equitable, and transformative.
The green economy is growing—and fast. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), efforts to limit global warming to 2°C could result in the creation of 24 million new jobs globally by 2030 in sectors like renewable energy, energy efficiency, and sustainable agriculture【ILO, 2018】. Yet the benefits of this green transition remain unequally distributed, particularly along lines of gender and income.
Women are severely underrepresented in many green industries. Globally, they account for just 32% of the renewable energy workforce, with significantly lower representation in technical and leadership roles【IRENA, 2022】. The disparity is even more striking in industries like construction and clean manufacturing—both critical to sustainable infrastructure.
The question is no longer just how we transition—but who gets to participate in, lead, and benefit from the green transition.
To answer that, we need a new approach to sustainability in the workplace—one that embeds gender equity, fair pay, and inclusive workforce strategies into the DNA of green business.
Enter the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs).
The WEPs Framework: A Blueprint for Just Green Workplaces
Developed by UN Women and the UN Global Compact, the WEPs offer seven principles that guide businesses in advancing gender equality in the workplace, marketplace, and community. While often associated with diversity and inclusion goals, WEPs are also a critical tool for shaping equitable climate action.
Here's how:
1. Embedding Equity into Green Job Creation
WEP 1: High-Level Corporate Leadership: Leadership matters. Companies must set the tone at the top, committing not only to decarbonization targets but also to gender-inclusive hiring, promotion, and retention strategies in climate-relevant departments.
This is especially critical in high-growth sectors like renewable energy and green construction, where women are often missing from technical roles due to biased pipelines and outdated recruitment models.
Action:Create internal green skills training programs tailored for women, invest in STEM outreach, and set transparent hiring targets that close the gender gap.
2. Ensuring Fair Pay and Safe Working Conditions
WEP 2 & 3: Fair Treatment and Non-Discrimination: The just transition must include fair wages, workplace protections, and freedom from harassment—particularly for women in agriculture, manufacturing, and construction, where wage gaps and exploitation are common.
In many countries, women working in the informal green economy—such as recycling or smallholder farming—lack access to contracts, social protection, or grievance mechanisms. This leaves them vulnerable despite contributing to sustainability goals.
Action:Conduct gender pay audits, ensure equal pay for equal work, and formalize labor protections in green job sectors.
HAVE YOU READ?
3. Building Inclusive Green Supply Chains
WEP 5: Enterprise Development, Supply Chain, and Marketing Practices: Sustainability audits often stop at environmental performance—but they should extend to gender and labor conditions in the supply chain. Are women-owned businesses being contracted for solar panel installation or urban farming initiatives? Are subcontracted workers receiving living wages and safe conditions?
Action:Incorporate WEP-aligned criteria into supplier selection, and prioritize procurement from women-led, climate-smart enterprises.
4. Community-Based Workforce Strategies
WEP 6: Community Initiatives and Advocacy: Many women, especially in marginalized communities, face systemic barriers to participating in green workforce programs—ranging from lack of childcare to discriminatory hiring practices. Earth Month is an ideal time to launch community workforce initiatives that train, empower, and uplift women as central actors in the green economy.
Action:Partner with local organizations to offer community-based green jobs training, prioritize inclusive hiring in sustainability projects, and fund women-led climate adaptation efforts.
5. Measuring What Matters
WEP 7: Transparency and Accountability: Greenwashing doesn’t just happen in emissions—it happens in workforce reporting too. Companies should publish gender-disaggregated data on green workforce participation, pay equity, and advancement.
Action:Incorporate WEPs into your ESG reporting strategy. Track progress on inclusive hiring, retention, and leadership development in green job sectors.
Why It Matters: Climate Without Equity Isn’t Sustainable
If climate action is to be truly sustainable, it must reflect the values of justice, inclusion, and opportunity. Applying WEPs to climate workforce planning creates a roadmap for shared prosperity in the green transition.
This is not only a moral imperative—it’s a business one. Research by McKinsey shows that advancing gender equality could add $12 trillion to global GDP by 2025【McKinsey, 2015】. Inclusive workforces are more resilient, more innovative, and more aligned with stakeholder expectations in a changing regulatory landscape.
As more companies commit to net-zero and Earth Month pledges, it’s time to evolve the conversation from carbon offsets to human-centred sustainability.
From Pledge to Practice
It’s no longer enough to have a boardroom sustainability strategy. True leadership is measured by who is hired, how they are paid, and whether they are safe, valued, and empowered—from rooftop solar teams to regenerative farms to climate innovation labs.
By embedding the Women’s Empowerment Principles into green job creation, we can ensure that the transition to a sustainable economy is not just greener—but fairer, smarter, and stronger.
The future of sustainability depends not just on what we build—but who we build it with.
About The SustainabilityX® Magazine
The SustainabilityX® Magazine is an award-winning, digital, female-founded, and female-led non-profit initiative bringing the environment and economy together for a sustainable future through dialogue, and now transforming the environment and economy for a sustainable future through the power of women's leadership. Founded on May 8, 2016, and inspired by the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals by Canada's Top 30 Under 30 in Sustainability Leadership awardee, Supriya Verma, the digital media initiative focuses on approaching the world's most pressing challenges with a holistic, integrated, systems-based perspective as opposed to the traditional and ineffective siloed approach with a single lens on interdisciplinary topics like climate and energy. This initiative ultimately seeks to explore how to effectively bring the environment and economy together through intellectual, insightful dialogue and thought-provoking discussion amongst individuals across sectors taking an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to untangling the intricate web of sustainability while championing women's leadership in sustainability.
The SustainabilityX® Magazine is built upon the four foundational pillars of sustainability: Environmental Stewardship, which emphasizes the importance of improving environmental health; Economic Prosperity, which promotes sustainable economic growth that transcends traditional capitalist models; Social Inclusion, which focuses on equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) for BIPOC, LGBTQ, and other marginalized or vulnerable communities; and Just Governance, which highlights responsible leadership, the equal application of the rule of law, and the creation of fair systems for all.
As we expand our mission to align with the Women's Empowerment Principles (WEPs), we continue to explore the diverse and interconnected factors that influence sustainability. By recognizing how these elements interact across local, national, and international levels, we aim to accelerate progress toward sustainability goals. In essence, this aligns with The SustainabilityX® Magazine's vision of integrating environmental and economic progress for a more just, inclusive, and sustainable future through thoughtful dialogue.
Whether your background is in science, engineering, business, law, politics, media, entertainment, or beyond, your voice plays a crucial role in shaping this future.
Show your support for independent, high-impact publications by becoming a subscribing member and help power international conversations that matter.
The SustainabilityX® Magazine is a proud member of the Sustainable Journalism Partnership, serves as a cause-based media partner for various events such as WIRED Impact, and officially delivers remarks at international conferences such as UNESCO's annual World Press Freedom Day Conference.
SustainabilityX® is a brand of the non-profit social business SPSX Group.
®SUSTAINABILITYX AND SUSTAINABILITYX DESIGNS ARE REGISTERED TRADEMARKS.®
Comments