The writer is an economist and FDI lead at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific. Contact: taylor21@un.org

Later this month, governments from around the world will gather at the UN headquarters in New York to decide how to accelerate progress towards gender equality. It’s a target they set in 2015, as one of the sustainable development goals, and which progress towards has stalled. They must look at how to leverage ripe, yet traditionally overlooked opportunities with the catalytic potential to accelerate progress on gender equality targets.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is one of those opportunities.

Many in the FDI world would agree it can have a meaningful impact on gender equality, for instance, by providing women with job opportunities, closing gender pay gaps and transmitting gender best practice. But there is a shortage of data demonstrating FDI’s transformative potential and contribution to gender equality.

The small, but growing body of empirical evidence developed over the past two decades lays a formidable foundation of conclusions showing that FDI helps improve women’s employment and wages. But most of this is quantitative, and qualitative work at the FDI-project level is still largely non-existent. It’s this data that is essential to building rich, dynamic evidence needed to inform FDI policies and strategies related to gender equality. I urge FDI experts and practitioners to conduct rigorous case studies and impact-assessments at the FDI-project level that can help build compelling evidence of its transformative potential for advancing gender equality. 

Calling case studies

Case studies require mapping and evaluating the instrumental role of investment promotion agencies (IPA) in undertaking gender-focused investment promotion, attraction and facilitation. These would serve the dual purpose of sharing experiences to identify best practices, while also encouraging more IPAs to integrate gender considerations across their activities. 

We also need to know more about what investors have promised versus what they are actually doing in host countries. Providing maternity leave and adhering to gender-parity policies — both at the factory-floor level and in senior management positions — might immediately come to mind. But there are other meaningful ways foreign investors can champion innovative gender commitments in host countries. 

Initiatives I’ve tracked in my work with IPAs in Asia Pacific include providing safe transportation to work for female workers. H&M does this in Bangladesh, with all buses driven by female conductors, while Nike provides safe transportation stipends to its female employees in Cambodia. Another example is free, onsite daycare facilities. Procter & Gamble provides this, plus children’s healthcare, at its offices in Pakistan, while Samsung does the same at various production facilities in Vietnam.

Other foreign firms provide mentoring and training programmes for women in the company and local community. Siemens in Indonesia, and Chevron in Bangladesh and Thailand, offer science, technology, engineering and maths training to girls and female high-school students. Hotel groups Soneva and Minor International provide skills training in the hospitality industry to vulnerable and at-risk women in the Maldives and Thailand. Samsung and Dow Chemical are among the firms providing safety gear designed specifically for women’s bodies, while Nike and Oracle provide sanitary provisions to female staff in Vietnam and India, respectively.

Another avenue is implementing procurement policies that target women-owned or -led suppliers. MeSovu, a female-owned producer of goat milk soaps in Fiji, has secured a contract with several major hotels owned by foreign investors in the country. 

More on FDI and gender equality:

• Gender defines investment promotion more than IPAs think
• Gender diversity lags in global IPA leadership
• The world needs more women in Stem

Gender-specific impact assessments of FDI projects are needed, too. Since 2021, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific has been collaborating with IPAs across the region to create a standardised tool for evaluating FDI projects’ sustainability. This includes a set of weighted indicators to evaluate and score FDI according to sustainable development targets, including comprehensive gender-specific indicators to better enable IPAs to measure and report on how their FDI projects contribute to national gender equality targets. 

As the global community gathers to recognise International Women’s Day, and reconvenes at the UN to renew its commitment to gender equality, FDI can no longer be ignored as a potential contributor to realising these pledges. We, as FDI practitioners and experts, can support this by developing and disseminating rigorous quantitative and qualitative evidence that help all stakeholders — governments, IPAs, investors and development partners — take actions to channel FDI flows into positive and far-reaching gender outcomes.

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