This new leadership role will oversee and ensure effective delivery of the Gender Integration initiative; bringing cutting-edge gender technical partnerships to advance results and amplify impact of the foundation’s goals. This includes delivery of our gender integration work to an expanded customer base including (a) targeted program teams (e.g. Agriculture Development (AgDev); Water, Sanitation & Hygiene (WSH); Financial Services for the Poor (FSP) with the potential to expend to Global Health teams such as Family Planning and Vaccine Delivery); (b) sub-initiative teams on Women’s Economic Empowerment (WEE); and (c) foundation staff.
Gender Integration Strategy:
- Lead the design and implementation of the foundation’s Gender Integration initiative in support of the foundation’s overarching GE program.
- Ensure the Gender Integration model is effectively designed and implemented to meet the needs of and strengthen results across core customer segments.
- Identify opportunities for adapting the Gender Integration model to ensure that the service & product strategy remains technically sound, relevant and useful.
Customer Engagement:
- Deeply understand the three customer segments for the gender integration delivery work (targeted PSTs; WEE lever teams; broader foundation staff), and ensure that gender integration products, services and technical partnerships are delivered to amplify the impact of PST goals.
- Incorporate customer feedback into the Gender Integration model architecture and business strategies.
Strategy & Thought-Leadership:
- Together with key teams in AgDev and FSP, lead the strategy design and implementation of the work on WMI and WFI respectively.
- Advance coherent solutions and synergies between the gender integration initiative and other critical elements of the GE team’s work; namely on women’s collectives (i.e. Self-Help Groups) and gender data.
- Provide senior thought-leadership and expertise on gender mainstreaming and integration with key stakeholders across relevant internal and external forums.
Technical Support on Gender Equality:
- Oversee the GE team’s technical partnerships with internal PSTs so that high quality technical support accelerates gender-intentional grant design.
- Ensure that technically sound solutions are applied to program implementation decisions, including technical input across the WMI and WFI grant portfolios with PSTs.
Measurement and Learning:
- Put in place a measurement and learning system to monitor and track results of the gender integration model.
- Communicate progress through clear, results-focused dashboards on gender integration with senior management and leadership.
- Oversee the diffusion of gender knowledge and skills across the foundation through the implementation of targeted initiatives (e.g. Women and Girls at the Center of Development (WGCD) learning agenda and the foundation-wide gender equality passport program).
Team & People Leadership:
- Demonstrate how the Gender Integration team can realize business value through internal delivery and support to PSTs.
- Mentor technical team members (both direct and leveraged). Directly manage a small team (currently one Senior Program Officer) including communicating performance expectations, creating goal alignment, integrating project and change management, giving and seeking feedback, providing coaching, measuring progress and holding people accountable, and recognizing achievement and lessons learned.
- Contribute to the GE team’s overall architecture and results as a member of the GE leadership team.
We are looking for people who enjoy the opportunity of working on complex problems and collectively creating solutions that have the potential for transformative change in the lives of people around the world. You must be prepared to work across a diverse set of disciplines, bridging a wide range of expertise all the while being a team player, with a demonstrated ability to work with flexibility, efficiency and diplomacy in an exciting, challenging environment.
The responsibilities of this role require that you should have an unquestioned commitment to gender equality and technical expertise in gender integration across program sectors and gender mainstreaming with internal program teams. Additionally, you should have:
- Experience in influencing organizational change on gender equality across complex and highly matrixed institutions.
- Strategy level design and implementation experience, with specific expertise in women’s economic empowerment (ideally women’s financial inclusion or women’s inclusion across agricultural markets).
- Excellent communication skills; including an ability to hold complexity and translate this into a coherent synthesis across diverse audiences.
- Excellent partnership building and stakeholder-management skills and judgement. Ability to define connections across different sector teams and parlay those into key measures of progress.
- Ability to inspire others, build consensus and bring people together around a common agenda.
- Creative problem-solving skills, with a rigorous approach to data and evidence as a motivating resource for gender integration.
- Demonstrated initiative to solve unstructured problems with creativity, high energy, and a positive outlook.
- A highly-cultivated sense of resilience. Ability to accept and recover from setbacks, adapt well to change, and drive forward in the face of adversity.
- A hands-on, team-oriented leadership style with the ability to be flexible and adjust to changing circumstances.
- Commitment to the foundation’s core values, mission and programs with an approach that is consistent with the foundation’s guiding principles while holding oneself to the highest ethical standards.
Education and Experience
- Recognition within the global professional community as an authority in gender equality and women’s empowerment, with grounded experience in gender mainstreaming within development institutions.