Artwork by Anita Pankoff
Words by Daisy Clague
For many, the words “green economy” evoke visions of hard hats and hi-vis vests. Construction workers and heat pump engineers retrofitting homes; electricians installing EV charging points on every street; foresters and biologists restoring peatland, forests, and seagrass meadows; and wind engineers erecting turbines offshore.
On the blueprint for a sustainable future, world leaders, trade unionists, and civil society don’t always agree. But there is one thing they tend to be united on: a green economy needs green jobs—and lots of them.
Green jobs are the jewel in the crown of policymakers’ climate and green infrastructure packages. Biden’s American Climate Corps promises to put 20,000 young, diverse Americans to well-paid work in conservation and clean energy, while policy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act are estimated to stimulate nine million new green jobs in the next decade. An increase in green jobs is also a core ambition of the Green New Deal, and it is similarly fundamental to unions’ fight for a just transition to meet the International Energy Agency’s goal of net zero by 2050. The European Green Deal is also mobilizing billions of euros to reskill workers in high-polluting industries.
But what actually counts as a “green” job? And who are these jobs for?
As things stand, there is no universal definition of the term. For the United Nations, green jobs are those in sectors that involve preserving or restoring environmental quality, while the International Labour Organisation specifies that green jobs should also be “decent” or in other words: adequately paid with safe working conditions. By these understandings—and if the above policy initiatives are anything to go by—the transition to decarbonized societies will result in millions of new, well-paid jobs for the likes of construction workers, electricians, and engineers in sectors like clean steel, renewable heat and renewable energy around the world.
This is, broadly speaking, good news. But while reducing carbon-intensive industries is crucial to planetary health, new jobs in these sectors will not be enough to make the transition to a low-carbon society just. In fact, without efforts to diversify the workforce, the transition risks further entrenching existing inequalities in the labor market by creating millions of jobs in sectors disproportionately accessible to men.
The problem is compounded by the assumption that “green jobs” fall under technological work in male-dominated industries. It may seem obvious that energy and industry are the sectors that matter most when we talk about greening the economy, but this supposition obscures the fact that other kinds of work are equally vital. As feminists have long pointed out, all economies—green or otherwise—are sustained by childcare providers, healthcare professionals, domestic workers, and social workers. These care jobs are also, incidentally, already generally low-carbon.
All economies—green or otherwise—are sustained by childcare providers, healthcare professionals, domestic workers, and social workers.
Already, the impacts of climate breakdown are magnifying social and gender inequalities. Earlier this month, a UN report found that female-headed households in low- and middle-income countries experience higher income losses due to extreme heat and flooding compared with male-headed households, making some of the poorest women poorer. It’s clear, then, that the stakes for getting the transition to a just “green economy” wrong are high.
By failing to recognize care as a sector that is relevant for green investment, policymakers are missing the opportunity to create not just a greener economy, but a more caring one that centers human rights, gender and racial equity, and environmental wellbeing. In the words of feminist writer Silvia Federici, “work is more than blue overalls.”
The access to jobs in the “green economy” has not been built on equal ground.
Women, particularly women of color, are vastly underrepresented in “green” industries. In 2019, a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) found that women hold just 32% of jobs in renewables worldwide. IRENA’s subsequent research on gender equity in the wind industry found that women represent only 21% of the workforce—lower even than in oil and gas. And in the Global North, green jobs are disproportionately held by white workers, who are also more highly paid. In the U.S., the National Solar Jobs Census found that 73% of solar workers were white. In 2017, the same census of solar workers also found that 36% of white male workers earned hourly wages in the highest bracket of $75 or more, compared with only 4% of women of color. It is also telling that, when it comes to the presence and experiences of LGBTQIA+ people in these sectors, there are no official statistics at all.
Even in green industries where women are more evenly represented, there is a gender divide in the types of roles done by women. “If we speak strictly about installing, women are still very, very far behind compared to men,” said Celia García-Baños López, programme officer at IRENA. In solar, women account for 58% of those employed in administrative jobs compared with less than a third of those in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) positions. In senior leadership women hold barely 13% of senior management posts. In the wind industry that figure is just 8%.
There are also notable regional variations in the data. “We saw that the Global South was lagging behind—not only in terms of the amount of women in leadership positions but also the amount of women that are joining the wind sector,” said Jeanette Gitobu, director of the Women in Wind Leadership Programme, a prestigious global initiative that offers mentorship opportunities to women from the Global South in the wind industry.
As long as these inequalities persist, green jobs creation is at odds with the possibility of a just transition. That’s why García-Baños López insists on the importance of increasing the representation of women in leadership positions. “It’s time to evolve from that mindset of, one woman at the table,” said García-Baños López, referencing the urgency of programmes like Women in Wind and the Energy Sector Women’s Leadership Initiative (ESWLI), which provide management skills training for women in the energy sector across Africa.
“Every single time I’m in rooms filled with women, we’re talking about the same things: creating more spaces for women,” said ESWLI President Idara Ekwo. “[That’s] not just because we’re women, but because we’re qualified to sit at that table.”
Without structural change, women’s self-empowerment can only go so far.
“We need to work across different segments of the wind sector; not just with individuals but also corporations and—on a larger scale—governments,” said Gitobu, who is determined to achieve gender parity in the wind industry by 2030—or in about 70 months, as she puts it.
One of the biggest barriers to women’s equality in renewables is the perception of gender roles, followed by cultural and social norms, according to research carried out by IRENA. Gender-sensitive policies—enacted by both governments and corporations—could play a major role in redressing these barriers. These policies could include protection from sexual violence in the workplace as well as gender quotas, pay equity, and free childcare. Equally important is investing in STEM education for women and girls, especially in off-grid rural communities.
Women hold just 32% of jobs in renewables worldwide.
But green investment has a deeper gender problem, beyond the white, male-skewed demographic of workers in the green industrial economy. In fact, the choice of which sectors are even considered relevant for green investment is gendered, too.
“The Green New Deal seems to assume that the work that really matters is in high-tech engineering and construction,” explained Sherilyn MacGregor, professor of environmental politics at the University of Manchester. “But if you want to envision a new society that is low-carbon, what about all the other work that has to be done?”
MacGregor is referring to the longstanding feminist call for care work—primarily done by women and marginalized groups like migrant women and men of color—to be socially and economically recognized as work. Society could not function without teachers, nurses, childcare workers, and elderly care providers. And yet this care work is routinely underpaid and undervalued.
“We’ve got this narrow focus on what is valued,” said Kate Metcalf, codirector of the Women’s Environmental Network in the U.K. “There’s a patriarchal, colonial mindset that shapes how we view the climate crisis and the solutions.” People in power are looking to solve the crisis within the same economic system that created it; a system built on colonial resource extraction and sustained by the invisible labor of women the world over. Swapping industry today for green industry tomorrow won’t fix that. “It requires fundamentally different thinking and systemic change,” Metcalf said.
It is no exaggeration to state that a gender-just transition to a green economy remains impossible without well-paid, unionized care jobs.
The argument that care jobs are green jobs was first taken up in 2019, when a coalition of organizations in the U.S. came together as the Feminist Agenda for a Green New Deal (FGND). Feminists in the U.K. and EU followed suit, arguing that investment in the care sector can create millions of well-paid, unionized, low-carbon jobs for women and marginalized groups. In fact, investment into care could create 2.7 times as many jobs as investment into construction. And this investment would make societies safer, healthier, and more resilient overall.
“It’s about creating this vision of a green caring economy for all,” said Metcalf.
That “care jobs are green jobs” is also increasingly a material reality, especially in the Global South where carers are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. “Environmental degradation affects all aspects of their lives,” Neha Mankani—who is a midwife by training and a climate activist by necessity—said of the mothers and babies that she sees in her clinic on Baba Island off the coast of Karachi, Pakistan.
“We’ve got this narrow focus on what is valued. There’s a patriarchal, colonial mindset that shapes how we view the climate crisis and the solutions.”
The implications of global warming for mothers are manifold. Extreme heat impacts maternal mental health, precarious food supply affects babies’ nutritional status, and—as Mankani notes—flooding can make it treacherous for her to travel to treat her patients. This is why, as a representative of the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM), Mankani also advocates for midwifery to be prioritized as a critical and low-carbon method of care during climate emergencies.
The FGND argument for investing in care belongs to a global ecosystem of feminist, queer, and decolonial activism at the intersection of climate change and economic justice. “You can’t talk about green jobs in isolation,” said Rachel Noble, a senior policy advisor in Women’s Economic Justice at Oxfam. “This call for investment in the care economy speaks to the need to shift to a different value system that focuses on reciprocity, cooperation, and mutuality, rather than profit maximization.” In practice, that would include overhauling the global financial architecture and redressing unequal—and often colonial—power relations between countries in the Global North and in the Global South. She also notes that the current fixation on GDP would need to be replaced by measures of environmental wellbeing, social justice, and human rights.
Economic justice at this scale requires greater structural transformation than, say, gender quotas for leadership roles. MacGregor describes the distinction as “outside the system” and “inside the system” approaches to redressing gender inequality. “[And] I think you need both,” said Erin Mansell of the Women’s Budget Group, one of the organizations that brought the FGND to the U.K. After all, if governments are going to focus their investment on green industry, then those jobs must be accessible to more people.
That’s not to say that diversifying the green industrial workforce will necessarily lead to a more just and caring economy overall. For that, governments also need to implement policies that recognize and redistribute paid and unpaid care work. Besides, “gendered stereotypes arise from the way our economy is structured,” said Mansell. If care workers were valued as highly as engineers, there may not be a gender imbalance in either workforce to begin with.
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Who Are Green Jobs Really For?
