Sustainability Consulting: Close the Eco Gender Gap

How companies can close the eco-gender gap – the importance of sustainability communication

An article by Alexandra Namyslowski.

After part 3 of our Eco Gender Gap article series showed why women suffer more from the destruction of our livelihoods, the last part is dedicated to the question of how companies can close the Eco-Gender-Gap and what role sustainability communication plays in this.

Fundamentally, it must be understood that the man-made climate crisis and the associated destruction of our livelihoods cannot be overcome without closing the gender gap. To do this, companies must understand three fundamental relationships:

1. Women improve corporate balance sheets in a sustainable manner

Although women are often the drivers of sustainability in private and public life, they are still heavily underrepresented in decision-making bodies that design measures or develop political and corporate strategies on climate change.
Studies show that companies with greater gender diversity on the board
- have a better ecological balance sheet and improve their environmental and social performance
- use more renewable energy
- are less likely to be sued for environmental violations
- reduce their CO2 emissions

A balance sheet from which everyone benefits exclusively in a sustainable manner. Closing the gender eco gap is therefore not only a moral imperative, but also a strategic advantage for companies and a catalyst for positive change.


2. Unsustainable role models do not grow out of existence

Anyone who thinks that conservative role models and understandings grow out of themselves is wrong. In Generation Z – that is, those born in 1996 – a wide gap is opening up: While more and more women are liberal to left-wing, men are drifting towards conservative to strongly right-wing – worldwide:

Source: Financial Times

This was also evident in the European elections:  

Source: Statista  

For a growing number of men, the sustainability issue of gender equality in particular has less to do with gender equality than with a general attack on the male gender, says Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life and research associate for opinion polls and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. This perception is found even among more liberal men. In 2022, a poll showed that 46 % of men under 50 who voted Democratic believe that feminism has done more harm than good. Among men over 50, the approval rate was only 4 %. Increasingly, men believe this “zero-sum narrative”: that they will be worse off if more women are given the same rights as men.

3. Companies have a responsibility to close the Eco Gender Gap

Companies shape role models through the marketing of their products and services. As long as unsustainable role clichés are still used, the eco-gender gap will widen, or at least remain, and fuel the "feminization of environmental responsibility". This means that people who shoulder the most care work – and these are usually women, who are already ahead in environmentally friendly behavior – are burdened with additional tasks in order to live up to the environmental responsibility attributed to them. In the male part of the population, companies at best alienate them from caring for our livelihoods, but in most cases (see part 2/4 link) they contribute to the development and maintenance of a subtle defensive attitude.

If, for example, an advertisement for a cleaning product shows that a woman takes care of a clean household and pays attention to more environmentally friendly products, the advertisement expresses exactly that: that a woman takes care of a clean household and pays attention to more environmentally friendly products. With such messages, companies run the risk of conveying that sustainability is a woman's issue. Why is the cleaning product not advertised with the message that men (also) don't like housework, and that the product solution should therefore be efficient and – logically – environmentally friendly.

Taking care of something – no matter what (household, children, the world around us, birthdays) – must be decoupled from "femininity". We can no longer afford such role clichés, because they have too negative an impact and we don't have enough time for them. Communication is faced with a nice challenge here: finding a way to get men excited about sustainability and if it can't be done using the "care" argument, then using other arguments, as the following ideas show:

- Rational smartness – along the lines of: "Who is stupid enough to saw off the branch they're sitting on?"
- Remorse: "I don't want my son to ask me why my senator status was more important to me than his future."
- Appeal to protective instinct: protect the foundations of life. Not status symbols.
- Frame vision and intelligence as a desirable status symbol: from "ownership obliges" to: intelligence/vision obliges.

You name it.
What did Fanta say? "Fun is what you make of it." This also applies to sustainability communication.