Tackling gender inequalities is becoming increasingly important for voluntary sustainability standards (VSS) and similar systems to address. Sustainability systems are looking to integrate gender into their standards and the management of their organisations. Sustainability systems that are not gender-responsive can result in unnecessary health and safety risks for women and girls, and lead to unequal impacts and unintended consequences.

Investigating emerging national and regional living income strategies: design, implementation and enabling conditionsDespite the growing interest in living income mechanisms and initiatives at the national or regional level, there is limited comparative evidence on how existing mechanisms are successfully integrated, operationalised and aligned into genuine national or regional living income strategies and which conditions enable coherent implementation across government and stakeholder groups.  

In 2022, CGIAR's HER+ initiative researchers partnered with ISEAL to explore how sustainability systems are able to contribute to advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. Gender is a crosscutting theme in ISEAL’s strategic priority to power solutions to sustainability challenges.