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HERrespect: Promoting Positive Gender Relations through Workplace Interventions
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Bangladesh | BSR (Business for Social Responsibility)
In order to address violence against women and harassment in the workplace, HERrespect will link international buyers and their supplier factories in Bangladesh, with local NGOs, to run workplace training sessions on gender, sexual and reproductive health and rights. This is an exciting project because of its potential for scaling up and impacting upon thousands of women in the garment industry in Bangladesh and beyond. This programme aims to develop a new approach on how workplaces can be transformed to recognise gender equality as a business priority.
This is a guide about how to facilitate a 90-minute session for a representative group of the HERrespect participants to come together and share and reflect on the learnings from HERrespect so far, and reaffirm the “Change Makers” concept. For this first joint session, the participants will collectively reflect on everyone’s experience of working in the factory, including both joys and challenges, in order to build a better understanding of everyone’s experiences in the factory, in order to improve relationships, build respect, improve our working experience and thereby our lives.
The 12-month program aims at promoting more gender equitable attitudes and relationships among women and men in the RMG industry. By training female workers, male workers, and management, HERrespect will raise gender awareness and improve interpersonal skills to prevent and address sexual harassment in the workplace and intimate partner violence at home.
The 12-month program aims at promoting more gender equitable attitudes and relationships among women and men in the RMG industry. By training female workers, male workers, and management, HERrespect will raise gender awareness and improve interpersonal skills to prevent and address sexual harassment in the workplace and intimate partner violence at home.
The 12-month program aims at promoting more gender equitable attitudes and relationships among women and men in the RMG industry. By training female workers, male workers, and management, HERrespect will raise gender awareness and improve interpersonal skills to prevent and address sexual harassment in the workplace and intimate partner violence at home.
In spite of economic opportunities for advancement, women workers in the global supply chain are still at risk of different forms of harassment in the workplace: between 40 to 50 per cent of women experience some form of harassment at work1. Women, most of them young and migrants from rural areas, are prone to workplace violence because of an interplay of social norms which condone violence against women (VAW), unbalanced power dynamics between managers and workers, inequitable gender attitudes, and poor awareness and execution on legal and compliance requirements.
Al Mamun, M., Parvin, K., Yu, M., Wan, J., Willan, S., Gibbs, A., ... & Naved, R. T. (2018). The HERrespect intervention to address violence against female garment workers in Bangladesh: study protocol for a quasi-experimental trial. BMC public health, 18(1), 512.
HERrespect, Bangladesh
Engaging male supervisors to tackle violence at work in the ready-made garment sector of Bangladesh
Poverty is a key driver of intimate partner violence (IPV). Women living in poorer places with lower socio-economic status, higher food insecurity, and less access to education and work opportunities are more likely to experience IPV. In addition, women without economic and social resources find it harder to leave abusive relationships. To date, women’s economic empowerment interventions have been central to IPV prevention approaches. This evidence review, however, suggests that women’s involvement in economic interventions has mixed effects on their vulnerability to IPV and can in fact increase the risks of their experiencing IPV, especially in situations where women’s participation in paid economic activity is the exception to the norm. Evidence suggests that interventions that aim to increase women’s access to work need to focus simultaneously on socially empowering women and transforming community gender norms to maximize the positive impact of women’s work on women’s empowerment and help prevent VAWG.
