International Consultant –Regional Systems Lab (RSL) Development under the Gender Action Lab (GAL)

I.  Contract Overview   Consultancy Title:  International Consultant –Regional Systems Lab (RSL) Development under the Gender Action Lab (GAL) Location:               Home-based Practice Area: Women’s Economic Empowerment Type of Contract:  Individual Contract Category (Eligible applicants): External Post Type and Level: International Consultant Languages Required: English Starting Date:  1 April 2025 – 30 September 2025 Duration of Contract: 1 April 2025 – 30 September 2025

Background

UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. Placing women's rights at the centre of all its efforts, the UN Women leads and coordinates United Nations system efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world. It provides strong and coherent leadership in support of Member States' priorities and efforts, building effective partnerships with civil society and other relevant actors.

Women’s Economic Empowerment is a key focus area for UN Women as expressed in its Strategic Plan. Empowering women to participate fully in economic life is essential to building strong economies, establishing just societies, and achieving the 2030 Agenda including Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 for gender equality and women’s empowerment and several other SDGs relating to inclusive growth, decent work, ending poverty, reducing inequality, and revitalizing the global partnership for sustainable development. Ensuring women’s participation and leadership and inclusion of their needs, experiences, and skills in the economy requires intentional actions and commitments from both the public and the private sector. 

 UN Women and the UN Global Impact have developed the WEPs framework to guide systemic private sector engagement towards gender equality. The WEPs are a set of Principles offering guidance to businesses on ways to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment in the workplace, marketplace and community. The seven WEPs principles are bucketed under (1) Leadership; (2) Workplace; (3) Marketplace; and (4) Community & Transparency. The WEPs are informed by international labour and human rights standards and grounded in the recognition that businesses have a stake in, and a responsibility for, gender equality and women’s empowerment. The WEPs are a primary vehicle for corporate delivery on gender equality dimensions of the 2030 agenda and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. By joining the WEPs community, the CEO signals commitment to this agenda at the highest levels of the company and to work collaboratively in multistakeholder networks to foster business practices that empower women. These include equal pay for work of equal value, gender-responsive supply chain practices and zero tolerance against sexual harassment in the workplace. The WEPs are envisaged to also encourage Transparency and Accountability and influence regulatory action to ensure compliance.

The UN Women Gender Action Lab

The UN Women’s Gender Action Lab (GAL), powered by the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), is a dynamic action platform launched by UN Women in Asia and the Pacific the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Government of Australia. Building on more than 10 years of UN women’s experience in mobilizing the private sector to commit and implement the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs), the Gender Action Lab aims to drive gender-transformative action and innovation within and through the private sector, advancing gender equality, women’s empowerment, and sustainable development to create a more inclusive economy.  

Envisioned as a long-term, multi-stakeholder, and multi-donor initiative, GAL is launched with an initial four-year phase. This period includes focused work in Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines under the Corporate Action Labs, alongside broader initiatives designed to influence private sector practices across Asia-Pacific. Through multiple programmatic pillars, GAL will leverage the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) to engage the private sector and other key stakeholders in the business ecosystem to work at national and regional level to advance action for gender equality. 

 One of these key programmes is the ‘Regional Systems Lab (RSL)’, which will bring together a dedicated group of partners and private sector stakeholders across Asia-Pacific to share, innovate and pilot tangible actions to tackle systemic challenges to gender equality. The systems labs are designed as longer-term initiatives that may run between one to three years, and each will focus on a specific area of action.  

 The inaugural GAL Regional Systems Lab will focus on ‘Sustainable Financing in Capital Markets for Gender Equality’ and especially the critical role that business regulators - primarily stock exchanges (SEs) and securities and exchange commissions (SECs) - play in advancing gender equality and women’s economic empowerment. UN Women will work with key strategic partners, such as the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and others, to create a first-of-its-kind action platform to convene regulators across the region for peer learning, sharing and pilot testing of a collaboratively developed Action Framework for gender equality.

Context of UN Women Gender Action Lab

Capital markets are increasingly being seen to have an important role in financing progress towards gender equality, both in the public and private sectors.  A variety of financial instruments are emerging globally to address gender-financing gaps and to allow capital to be invested with gender-outcomes in mind. In addition to Gender-Lens Investing (GLI) and concessional loans which have been used to channel capital towards gender equality, debt instruments such as Social, Sustainability, and Sustainability-linked Bonds and Loans also provide financing opportunities for market participants that want to advance gender equality by creating a modality for them to raise and provide capital for projects/programs that have a positive gender-impact, as noted in a joint paper by the ICMA, UN Women and IFC1. These modalities can shift the typical relationship between issuers and investors that centers on the exchange of financial data toward one that also focuses on accelerating organizational change to advance social impact. This paper goes on to note that there exists a high demand specifically in the bond market for gender related sustainable bonds. For issuers, these bonds offer an opportunity to demonstrate their leadership in advancing gender equality. They also offer issuers the opportunity to diversify their investor base and leverage new sources of financing, as well as the potential to be included in sustainability indices. For public sector issuers, integrating gender objectives into bond frameworks is a powerful way to raise financing to address the structural causes and consequences of gender-based discrimination at the national or sub-national level.2 

In addition to enabling financing, capital market regulators such as Stock Exchanges and Securities and Exchange Commissions (SECs) hold significant potential to influence the private sector to mainstream gender considerations to enable progress towards SDG 5.

For stock exchanges and Securities Exchange Commissions to be able to utilize their full potential in influencing the wider private sector towards gender equality, they need support, guidance and awareness-building. Regulators like the SECs and SEs play a pivotal role in driving systemic change for gender equality in the private sector, setting the rules and standards that govern corporate behaviour. An IFC report developed in strategic collaboration with UN Women, “How Exchanges Can Advance Gender Equality – Updated Guidance and Best Practice”, identifies three key areas where Stock Exchanges (SEs) can drive progress on gender equality: promoting gender-focused products, strengthening market performance on gender metrics, and leading by example through their own practices and policies.1  

Through mandatory disclosures, gender diversity requirements, and ESG-linked listing criteria, SEs ensure transparency and accountability, driving capital toward inclusive companies. Examples of such practices include awareness creation through educational resources, public commitments to gender equality by signing the WEPs, encouraging companies to report on critical gender metrics, such as the gender pay ratio, representation of women at entry, mid, and senior-executive levels, and annual promotion rates for women, and leading by example by prioritizing transparency and accountability in its own operations. Gender-focused financial products like bonds and ESG funds incentivize the private sector to adopt inclusive practices, advancing progress towards women’s empowerment.  

Specifically, regarding channeling capital with a gender lens, while gender-bonds and other financial instruments are emerging globally, there is a need to accelerate action in the Asia-Pacific region and engage stakeholders to increase awareness. As noted by a study by the Luxembourg Green Exchange (LGX)3, the vast majority of issuers of gender-focused bonds are Sovereign, Supranational and Agencies (SSAs), accounting for almost two-thirds of all issuances. The remaining one-third issuances come from corporations and financial institutions. In its research, the LGX has noted several challenges in addition to the limited issuances of gender-focused bonds by corporates, such as limited explicit references to women in the target population specified by issuers ex-ante, scarcity of women–related impact metrics reported ex-post and a gender component being restricted to only a few categories of projects (as many as 77% of gender-focused bonds report having less than 50% of their proceeds allocated to gender projects). This indicates a pressing need for interventions to increase awareness among the private sector, while providing it with appropriate frameworks, guidelines and advisory to identify women who will benefit from the bond-issuance, to report on metrics measuring impact and benefits achieved, and to integrate gender as a transversal dimension in the issuances. 

It is noteworthy that among non-SSA issuances of gender-focused bonds as covered in the LGX study, 59% of the bonds, representing 80% of the amount raised through such bonds globally, originate in Europe.4 This indicates the huge opportunity in other regions of the world to learn from existing success stories, especially Asia, given that Asia is the second main region when it comes to issuing gender-focused bonds, underlining the existing interest in the region.5

The Opportunity: Sustainable Finance in Capital Markets Systems Lab

UN Women believes that a regional platform in the Asia-Pacific that brings together stock exchanges and securities exchange commissions from regional countries to build their awareness and capacities to enable more issuances of gender-focused bonds will increasing the gender-responsiveness of stock exchanges and of listed companies; and will encourage the development of new products for mobilizing sustainable finance with a gender lens, through capital markets. This hypothesis recognizes that capital markets, corporate bond markets and tax regimes in various countries are at different stages of evolution. However, setting up such a platform and creating a template for capital market stakeholders to adopt can significantly contribute to unlocking a hitherto under-leveraged channel for mission-aligned stakeholders to mobilize capital towards achieving gender-equality outcomes. Such a platform can collaboratively strengthen the gender equality metrics recommended by stock exchange sustainability disclosure guidance documents, which as of now have significant gaps and inconsistencies.10 Gaps are in the form of the lack of standardized metrics, which can lead to inconsistent reporting between companies within a market and between markets internationally, and variations in the definitions of key terms like \"senior management\" which complicate comparative analysis and create risks of practices like “gender washing,” where misleading metrics undermine transparency and accountability.11 It is noteworthy that analysis of such guidance documents already exists and the proposed platform can also enable peer-learning among regional Stock Exchanges.  

 Towards these we propose to establish a Regional System Lab (RSL) to convene and engage Stock Exchanges and Regulators to accelerate Gender Equality, as part of the UN Women Gender Action Lab (GAL).  

The first UN Women RSL: the ‘ASIA PACIFIC SUSTAINABLE FINANCE IN CAPITAL MARKETS SYSTEMS LAB: Accelerating actions with Stock Exchanges to make financial markets more gender-inclusive will focus on the critical role that Stock exchanges (SEs), regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commissions (SECs) and issuers play in advancing gender equality and women’s economic empowerment and aiming to work with these institutions in Asia and the Pacific. It will bring together stock exchanges and securities exchange commissions from Asia-Pacific regional countries to learn, share best practices, and build their capacity to take action to advance gender equality, informed by a to-be-developed Action Framework that sets out multiple pathways of action and provides a roadmap for exchanges and other regulators to shift markets towards advancing gender equality. 

The System Lab aims to:

Objective of the Assignment

The inaugural GAL Regional Systems Lab (RSL) will focus on the critical role that business regulators - primarily stock exchanges (SEs) and securities and exchange commissions (SECs) - play in advancing gender equality and women’s economic empowerment. UN Women will work with key strategic partners, to create a first-of-its-kind action platform to convene regulators across the region for peer learning, sharing and pilot testing of a collaboratively developed Action Framework for gender equality.  

 This assignment seeks a service provider that will support UN Women ROAP to conduct preparatory research to enable the establishment of the above-mentioned Regional Systems Lab and support in its execution.  

Specifically: 

Description of Responsibilities/ Scope of Work

The assignment will include the following components and steps: 

        a. Conduct interviews and desk research to identify best practices of capital market actors (including Stock Exchanges, SECs, Stock-Exchange convening platforms i.e. ASEAN Capital Markets Forum etc.) advance gender equality - especially in Asia and the Pacific, but also including selected global best practices. Identify action areas and examples for the Action Framework. 

        b. Create an overview of existing tools, guidance to advance gender-equality in the context of ESG/ Sustainability in Capital markets, taking into account the importance of linking business performance and gender equality.  

         c. Review a currently developed Brief on gender-responsive financial instruments (on-going) as input into the Draft Action Framework   

          d. Informed and embracing existing materials develop a draft Action Framework for capital market regulators (with specific actions, topics of engagement, outputs, milestones and success metrics). This Action Framework will function as the key instrument to guide, support and track actions. RSL will use this as a key to implement a joint workplan.  

          e. Informed by the Draft Action Framework, create a heat map of current actions in Asia and the Pacific. This heatmap will provide a clear indication of where the different capital markets stand. Also include 2-3 advanced global capital markets. 

           f. Identify key influencer departments / personnel within the Asia and the Pacific capital markets community.  

           2. Engage with representatives of market capital regulators in select countries in the Asia Pacific region to understand their needs and challenges. 

           a. Conduct 1-on-1 conversations with key personnel of the market regulators identified above to verify and get/strengthen data for the heat map; and understand their challenges and areas of support required (UN Women will support in introductions) to implement actions.  

          b. Engage with sector experts to identify requirements and modalities for APAC market regulators to institute mechanisms towards incorporating gender equality considerations within their spheres of influence.  

            c. Work closely with UN Women staff to mobilize min. 8 capital markets to join phase 1 of the RSL. 

            d. Informed by the identified challenges and opportunities design a 12-month RSL workplan, develop operational structure, modalities and envisioned results.  

             e. (In parallel) Refine and finalize the Action Framework incorporating feedback from UN Women, partners and sector experts.  

            f. Identify topics of capacity building required and identify case-studies / trainers who can provide such capacity building via webinars and 1-on-1 consultations.  

            g. With UN Women’s support, organize such webinars for capital market regulators in the Asia-Pacific region.  

            h. Provide support in developing an engagement plan and develop the agenda, manage logistics and execution support for a virtual kick-off and in-person RSLs launch-event alongside the WEPs Forum.

Tasks/Activities  Estimated timeline since the start of the engagement  1  Detailed workplan including deliverable schedule, key touchpoints, convenings, events etc. 

0.5 months 

15 April 2025

Secondary research report which includes best practices of capital market regulators globally towards promoting gender equality, and areas for intervention / replication in the Asia Pacific region. 

1.5 months 

15 May 2025

2 months 

1 June 2025

Engagement with Stakeholders and Finalization of Action Framework 

3.5 months 

 15 July 2025

5 

Developing an Engagement Plan and Execution support for RSL launch and event 

Final Review and Feedback Discussion

6 months 

1 September 2025

30 September 2025

Consultant’s Workplace and Official Travel

The consultant will be home-based, working in close coordination with the UN Women Office for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok.

The consultant may be required to travel to stakeholder locations in Southeast Asia for consultations, workshops, or meetings. UN Women will cover travel costs in accordance with its travel policies.

Core Values: 

Core Competencies: 

Please visit this link for more information on UN Women’s Values and Competencies Framework.   FUNCTIONAL COMPETENCIES: 

Education and Certification:

Experience:

Languages:

How to apply