Women are out in the field across Latin America, delivering goods, installing solar panels, providing community-based services and keeping infrastructure running. Yet, jobs with the highest pay, technical certifications and supervisory responsibility remain overwhelmingly male.
For Bogotá-based fund manager ALIVE Ventures, closing the gender gap is an opportunity to bridge the skills gap as well. ALIVE has found that expanding women’s access to technical and supervisory roles can help portfolio companies strengthen hiring, reduce turnover and build more resilient businesses alongside better economic opportunities for women.
To understand where women are falling out of the mobile workforce pipeline, ALIVE, which spun out of nonprofit impact investor Acumen, commissioned the research firm Briter to document the gaps.
Women in the workforce often face obstacles such as unsafe transportation, protective equipment that doesn’t fit, limited childcare and a lack of digital accounts. The mismatch “creates a persistent gap between presence and power,” according to “Reducing Gender Gaps in the Mobile Workforce Economy in Latin America.”
Removing those barriers could help portfolio companies fill hard-to-staff technical roles and boost their performance. “The main biases are the most basic,” Briter’s Laura Carrión told ImpactAlpha. “If you don’t own your own phone, you cannot receive the salary on your own wallet. Usually the salary goes to the husband, or the son, or the father.”
Investor role
The report urges investors and portfolio companies to look beyond overall workforce numbers and examine where women sit across the value chain—by role, pay and technical responsibility—to identify where they fall out of the career pipeline.
From there, it recommends investing in “enabling assets”: the basic tools workers need to participate in the modern workforce, including smartphones, internet access, safe transportation, properly fitting protective equipment and digital payment accounts.
The barriers extend into the field. Female-sized protective equipment is often unavailable, and remote work sites frequently lack basic accommodations. “We’ve arrived at sites with no hotels. We set up a small camp and hung hammocks. Sometimes the bathroom isn’t set up for a woman,” an operations coordinator at a renewable energy company says in the report.
Some of the fixes are even simpler. Gender-neutral job descriptions, transparent promotion criteria, structured onboarding, and holding supervisors accountable for hiring and promotion decisions require little more than management attention.
“If we can better understand where those gaps are across the value chains we invest in, we can help our companies address them in the design of their business models and products, improving gender outcomes and business performance at the same time,” ALIVE’s Alan Pierce said.
Employer playbook
The report offers a playbook for employers. It starts by asking companies to look beyond headcounts and examine where women work — by job, pay, and level of responsibility — to see where they disappear from the career ladder.
Hiring is another area that needs closer examination. Job ads often push women toward support roles while men apply for technical jobs. Before deciding qualified women don’t exist, the report says, companies should look at where they recruit and connect with vocational schools that train women for those roles.
Keeping women in those jobs requires a different approach. Some leave because of caregiving responsibilities. Others because field conditions are unsafe or there is little room to advance. The report recommends improving lodging, sanitation, transportation, and grievance systems for mixed-gender field teams.
“Formalization can only go so far,” said Pierce. “because there’s these other variables at play that don’t permit women to don’t enable them to maybe benefit as much as they could from that formalization.”
