"An Opportunity to Walk the Talk: Making Gender Disclosure Part of the EITI Standard", 11 February 2019

...In just under a month, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative board will meet to discuss revisions to their governing standard, including gender provisions...EITI...was originally created as a gender-neutral platform...Before it started to explicitly address issues of gender, EITI developed an unintended bias toward having more men participate and be able to access its information. Over the past several years, the EITI board and its supporters have said that they want to make sure the initiative can be more gender-responsive...The proposal championed by civil society members of the board will enhance the EITI Standard and require:

• Multi-stakeholder groups to consider gender when creating their membership
• Disclosure of employment statistics disaggregated by gender
• Commentary of whether a country conducts gender-responsive budgeting
• Consideration of how different genders access information when creating a data dissemination strategy

These changes are not only necessary. They are relatively easy to implement...Many countries and companies already disaggregate labor information by gender. For the last two years, Tullow Oil, BP, Shell and many private sector entities based in the U.K. published a report analyzing the pay gap between men and women working for their company. Having the information about gender breakdown in the work force is the first step for countries and companies to address the gender gap...Making these changes a requirement for all EITI implementing countries is an opportunity for the EITI to grow from talking about gender to creating policy change that meets minimum gender norms...