Gender and Waste Nexus: Experiences from Bhutan, Mongolia and Nepal

encouraged. Training on waste segregation in work environments would also help employees learn how to separate waste both at work and at home. The professionalization of some waste activities is displacing womenn. In recent years, the Ulaanbaatar municipal government has taken steps toprofessionalize street sweeping. Before becoming professionalized, street sweeping was mostly carried out by women, who are now being replaced by men. To date, this process of excluding women has been enacted in small, incremental, separate steps, which has made the made the overall consequences of this displacement largely invisible. Policy considerations: Collecting gender-disaggregated data about the labour force throughout the waste sector will enable changes and trends, such as women’s displacement, to become more visible. Commitments towards equal employment opportunities could be incentivized to prevent women being excluded from this increasingly desirable job sector. There is a lack of gender-disaggregated data. In Mongolia, gender-disaggregated data are not collected in a systematic way for the waste sector. Policy considerations: Collecting gender-disaggregated data at every level of waste management could support the development of evidence-based and gender- sensitive policies. For example, it would be useful for researchers and policymakers to conduct detailed studies at the household level that focus on waste and gender in order to determine a baseline. Consumption in Ulaanbaatar is rising rapidly as Mongolia becomes more globalized and integrated into global circuits of capital. Policy considerationss: Since actors and stakeholders in the waste sector play different roles in creating and managing waste, engagement across the entire sector is the only path towards sustainable waste management. Waste management is likely to become more reliant on high technology and engineering. Higher reliance on technology and engineering is likely to intensify the consequences of the gender disparities in those fields. Policy considerations: While overall education rates for girls and women in Mongolia are equal to or even exceed that of boys and men, the STEM fields remain the most unbalanced educational domains as regards gender. Programmes to actively engage girls in STEM Operational level

subjects will be needed. Current presumptions that boys and men do not need an education to obtain manual labour jobs will not be the case in modernizing waste sectors. Boys and men may need to be encouraged to pursue their education further through to higher education levels. Modernization of the waste sector may threaten the livelihoods of actors who earn their living in the current informal waste sector. Although modernizing the waste sector can help mitigate health and climate change problems, it may threaten the livelihoods of actors engaged in the current informal sector, especially informal scrap and recycling dealers and landfill pickers. Policy considerations: Taking a socioeconomic and gender perspective when modernizing waste practices may enable a transformation that “leaves no one behind” – a core SDG commitment. This means considering gender equality in staffing and appropriate training for individuals to transfer to upgraded systems. Attitudes, stereotypes and perceptions about appropriate gender roles drive the gender and waste nexus in Mongolia (as elsewhere) . For example, women are assigned traditional family-based roles, which is then used as an explanation for why they cannot take on certain jobs. Gender norms and biases are also repeatedly given as explanations as to why women should not be truck drivers. Policy considerations: Encouraging changes in attitudes about gender and perceptions of appropriate feminine and masculine behaviour may be as important as technological or structural changes in reforming the waste sector in a gender-sensitive manner. Information-sharing and awareness-raising on gender mainstreaming should also be promoted widely. Policy considerations: It is worth exploring how some women have managed to succeed in the recycling sector as business owners and why this seems to be an exception compared with other waste professions. Such an assessment may lead to useful findings, which could be used to formpolicies for strengthening gender equality in the waste sector. For example, it might be that it is more socially acceptable for women to manage recycling businesses, since it could be considered an extension of their role in managing and segregating waste in the household. If this is proven to be the case, the recycling sector may be an entry point for women to gain formal, well-paid jobs in the waste sector. Recycling seems to be a successful pathway for women to develop waste sector enterprises..

Mongolia

39 Gender and waste nexus