This Guide is a resource for social enterprises interested in gender empowerment practices to support women who they employ and their women beneficiaries. It is meant to be an easy-to-use guide, to increase awareness of gender issues and to provide examples of gender empowerment practices that social enterprises can adopt. Importantly, the Guide suggests indicators that can be used to measure the impact of social enterprise practices. It identifies some potential challenges when empowering women that social enterprises may need to consider.
This is a living document. The research team and Social Enterprise UK (SEUK) would appreciate comments and feedback to improve the Guide for use by social enterprises more widely. You can add comments directly in each post on our blog or by contacting the research team:
Principal Investigator:
Dr Maria Granados, m.granados@westminster.ac.uk
Co-investigators:
Dr Lilian Miles, l.miles@westminster.ac.uk
Dr Anastasia Alexeeva, A.Alexeeva@westminster.ac.uk
Dr Vincent Rich, richv@westminster.ac.uk
We thank our Research Assistant Hannah Paley for her valuable support. (w1811540@my.westminster.ac.uk)
Financial – Getting funding, being sustainable Interviews with social enterprises suggested that financial constraints are one of the key challenges to their work. Some social enterprises mentioned the need for funding to cover core expenses such as salaries. However, attracting…
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Methods: The social enterprises in our study shared several methods used to measure the impact of their gender empowerment practices. These include: Case studies: Make use of narratives of how the women have ‘moved on with my life, what do…
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Social enterprises described a set of practices that support the empowerment of their women employees and women beneficiaries. Using the UN definition of gender empowerment, we group the practices into five groups. Practice 1. What did social enterprises do to…
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How did social enterprises build women’s self-worth and self-belief? Offer counselling and emotional support Social enterprises we interviewed provided counselling and emotional support by listening to ‘previously silenced voices’ of women beneficiaries. As one social enterprise shared: ‘the women that…
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