Short History

Aruna Rao and David Kelleher are the founders of Gender at Work. Along with Rieky Stuart, the three have spent the last fifteen years working together to promote women’s empowerment and gender equality with a wide range of organizations. Dissatisfied with existing approaches to promoting gender equality, Aruna, David and Rieky worked with leading activists and scholars, experimenting with approaches that combine feminist thinking with insights from the world of organizational development.

In 1999, Aruna, David and Rieky put the fruits of their collaboration on paper, publishing Gender at Work: Organizational Change for Equality.

Gender at Work was founded in 2001 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). 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

Now, after a decade of learning, organizing and trying things out, we have become a world leader in the field of gender and institutional change work.

Gender at Work was incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2003.

The following testimony comes from a particpant in a Gender at Work-facilitated Action Learning Process: "A meeting to conduct a baseline assessment of an organization progressed smoothly, but the the group was not energized by the process. Collecting baseline information is tedious at the best of times. But things changed when the group was asked how they felt about working with their facilitators. This simple question of feelings, often overlooked, transformed the entire session. The natural shy nature of the members soon dissolved. Both men and women members revealed the traditional nature of their community and the fact that women are not viewed as significant contributing members of society.

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