Short History
Beginning with their work with BRAC in 1994, Aruna Rao and David Kelleher, Gender at Work's co-founders, along with Rieky Stuart, who has been working in the field since the 1960s, have together spent the last fifteen years promoting women’s empowerment and gender equality with a wide range of change-seeking organizations. Dissatisfied with existing approaches to promoting gender equality, Aruna, David and Rieky worked with a number of leading activists and scholars, experimenting with approaches that combine feminist thinking with insights from institutions, administration and organizational development practice.
Since then, Gender at Work has developed into a world leader in the field of gender and institutional change work through a decade of practical experimentation, knowledge building and organizing, promoting women’s empowerment and gender equality.
As Aruna, David and Rieky exchanged ideas with other field practitioners and thought leaders at a series of conferences throughout the 1990s (sharing common interests and strategies for change), they determined to work in a collaborative process, resulting in the publication of Gender at Work: Organizational Change for Equality in 1999.
In June 2001, UNIFEM, AWID, WLP, and CIVICUS hosted a global meeting of scholars, policy makers and practitioners, at which Gender at Work was created. This dynamic new network had three primary goals:
1. To build knowledge on gender-biased institutional features and how to change them
2. To support institutional transformation initiatives and capacity development of change agents
3. To work with key decision makers in related social justice/development/rights communities to integrate this new knowledge in their analyses, strategies and practice
Gender at Work was founded by the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID), World Alliance for Citizen Participation (CIVICUS), the United Nations Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and Women's Learning Partnership (WLP).
Gender at Work was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2003.
