 So yes, good afternoon and good morning to everyone. We will get started now with the session on the gender pay gap study in the Colombian banana industry. So we will be presenting the results and recommendations of the study that was conducted throughout this past year. For the welcome on behalf of the World Banana Forum Secretariat, I would like to give the floor to Mr. Victor Prada, the Secretary of the World Banana Forum. So Victor, please, you have the floor. Thank you, Camilla. I appreciate it. Again, I would like to welcome to this meeting. Today we will present the results of the gender pay gap study that has been piloted in Colombia and in the Colombian banana industry under an ongoing letter of agreement between FAO and Patriot Germany. The activities which have been supported locally by the Latin American and Caribbean network of Patriot as more producers and workers began at the end of 2021 with the objective of enabling a deeper understanding of the extent causes and possible solutions to the gender pay gap and higher labor settings. The research has been conducted by the Anchor Research Institute and consisted on piloting the Anchor Gender Model, which has been launched and presented to the World Banana Forum members during a webinar of the Task Force on Gender Equity in October 2020 already sometime back. Two plantations with different settings were selected for the study, including a unionized plantation in Yurava region and a non-unionized plantation in La Guajira in order to explore potential differences and similarities. So due to the nature of the study, the names of the plantations have remained confidential as you can imagine and the results that will be presented today will be done in an anonymized manner. To complement the research and data collection, the study also entailed interviews with local stakeholders to validate the findings, which we will hear more about today. A stakeholder workshop was held for local actors on the 8th of July to present the preliminary findings of the study. So the World Banana Forum also extended the invitation to the Gender Equity Task Force and World Banana Forum members. This session that I mentioned the 8th of July content on important inputs and questions from local actors, which we will also hear more about today, and which were considered in the final review of the study report. We are pleased to inform you that the study report has been finalized and will soon be available publicly. Today, we'll have presentation from the Anchor Research Institute and the local researchers involved in the study to present the main results and findings. If you could kind of go through the agenda. So first, Marta and Richard Anchor will provide the introduction and information about the Research Institute. Then we'll talk about the mythology and results of the study by Salia Smith and Luisa Fernanda Bernat Diaz. Then we have a QA session, a discussion session. Right after we'll talk about the good practices and recommendations by Salia Smith and Luisa Fernanda Bernat Diaz. Again, discussion and closing remarks by the World Banana Forum Secretary and the Anchor Research Institute will be provided at the end of the session today. So, so we would like to take this opportunity to thank all of those organizations involved in making this study possible, including the Federal Germany, and the Anchor Research Institute for their support and incredible efforts to materialize this activity. We'd also like to thank you for your participation today and hope that you will find the results of the study insightful. Yeah, I will also further encourage you to participate actively in the discussions and to raise any questions you may have meeting the session today. So without Camilla, I think we are good to go. And we can proceed with the agenda. Thank you very much and welcome again. Yes, thank you very much, Victor. So I think we would like to give the floor now to Richard and Marsha anchor to give a short introduction to the study. Before we go into presenting the methodology and the results. So Richard and Martha, please you have the floor. Thank you everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here and to have this these results presented. We're really excited and it's a new methodology. It's a new approach. And this is the first public presentation of any results. So it's important to us. And it's just one of five pilots so there are four other pilots that are various stages of being completed. It's a pilot and so the idea of our pilots where is that we would try and have different industries like garments and different countries and different agricultural products. So we're going to be doing berries in Africa and garments and in Turkey, Bangladesh and Thailand, just to give you an idea. I'm going to just say the next slide with just to give you some background on the institute and then a little bit of background on the methodology but really little background methodology because Sally is going to carry forward about what's been happening and how it's been developed by Sally and the lead. So we've now started an institute. Martha and I and we now have a staff of seven people and almost all of them are on this call right now. We also have a global network of researchers around the world, of which you will hear from two of them today. We're going to disseminate and this is one of our main points of our work is that almost everything is public. This is a little bit unusual, and that some of these payroll data are not always public because they're sensitive information. But almost everything we like to be public so it was great to work with World Banana Forum and fair trade in order to try and get this out in public because it is a sensitive area for some employers. You know, the idea is our idea with our institute is that we're trying to shape public policy by providing public information and try to improve the life and the quality of life of workers around the world. And just that there are a number of people on this call from the Global Knowledge Coalition that we're co-founders of and we still work very closely with them. And it's been an extraordinary partnership of knowledge and action to improve the effectiveness of wage setting. Policy is somewhat unique of having researchers work so closely together with standard setting organizations and each of us has our expertise and knowledge and so the merging of the two has been really very, very effective. Next slide. Just as a little bit of a quick thing about the background, Martha and I have been working on gender for many years, not in the last 20 years we've been mostly on living wage issues, but prior to that in our earlier lives we had done a lot of work on gender and inequalities. So it was an exciting idea of doing something new. And we thought it was totally justified as part of a living wage group because women's pay is less than men's pay almost everywhere in the world. There's always a gender pay gap and women are concentrated much more than men are in lower paid wage employment. And so anything which raises the lower part of the wage pyramid will help women more than it will help men. So living wage by itself is actually a very gendered idea. But that from our earlier work and really it's almost all work to date it's been concentrating on the differences in gender pay gap like there's a 20% gap globally. For more of a higher level like the societal level of education, stereotyping, gender stereotyping and societal levels. That isn't something that employers can do necessarily do a great deal about their, they live within the societies. And so the idea of this whole project started with if employers were cooperative and would provide us with information about payrolls, their payroll data. We could look at that and see why there was a difference of pay between genders and then it recommend what could be done about it. And so it was to bring the whole idea of gender pay gap to the level at which employers have some ability to do something. So that's really what it's about. And to a good extent because of Sally, it was to try and make this really a truly a sort of mixed method approach where you go in and also do qualitative interviews with people at the workplace. So as to not only see the raw statistics of the pay differences because women say work less hours or they're in lower paid occupations, but also about what you can do about it and what kind of policies are possible. And that comes from some of this qualitative interviewing and group discussions. So it's a truly a mixed method to have the raw statistics but also what you can do. And so anyway, so I, you know, now I'm going to pass it on to Sally and to Louisa to carry it on but just just to have to first introduce them. And I just say that we're really really feel fortunate to be working with them. Because they're really as some people would call the best of the best that aren't just good, but the best among the best that you'll see from this presentation. Sally is an independent research consultant. She's a gender specialist, obviously, for many years. She's been working for 20 years and working on gold supply chains, including a lot of the banana sector so they know in Ghana for example she did a study for us living wages in Ghana. That was dealing with the banana sector in Ghana. And she's leading the development of the methodology in general and the other four pilot studies. But for Columbia for various reasons, language and other reasons, we're lucky to get Louisa Louisa Fernanda. She's been a researcher for over 20 years. She's the head of the research office of Columbia's National Institute for evaluation and also head of the planning and budgeting office at the Jorge Tadio Lozano, my Spanish is okay. And she is currently working at the Faculty of Economic Administration, administrative sciences in Bogota with the big emphasis on gender, gender issues. So I pass it on to Sally to describe to us what the exciting new methodology and then Louisa Louisa about the some of the results. Thanks Richard. Hi everyone. Very, very happy to be here presenting you to you today. We've had a few different sessions with the Well Banana Forum but this is the important one right because this is when we have some results. So it's really exciting. I'm going to just say a few words about the methodology for those of you who who haven't been in previous sessions. And then I will just kind of set the context for the study in Columbia, before handing over to Louisa to present the bulk of the results. And then we will we will break to have some some Q&A before then returning to the recommendations. Thanks again to everyone who was involved in making this study happen. And particular thanks to the two companies that participated for opening their doors to us and being so open and generous with their time and with sharing data with us. And of course also huge thanks to the workers who who also shared their experiences and their their views with us during the field work. So next slide please. So this slide really just is a it's an overview of the way we're thinking about gender pay gaps in this new methodology that we've developed. So as as Richard said, you know, the point of the gender pay gap methodology and the studies that we're doing is not just to measure the size of the gender pay gap. That in and of itself is of some interest but it's really not very useful if you don't really understand why there's a gender pay gap. So when we're looking at the why we are differentiating between what we're calling direct determinants and indirect determinants. So the direct determinants are the things at the workplace or the sector that have a very very direct effect on how much a worker will earn. So this is things like the type of work that they do, the type of contract they have, how much time they work per act per day per week per month. What forms of wage payments they have, you know, whether they're paid peace rate or time rate, what kinds of benefits they receive and other characteristics that are specific to the workplace. So these are all things that can have a very direct effect on men's wages and women's wages. Behind those are a whole range of different indirect determinants that what most people would kind of think of as root causes. And those root causes can be at the workplace level or the sector level in relation to things like employment policies and practices of recruitment policies, the workplace culture, the degree to which men and women are represented in trade unions and whether there's a collective bargaining agreement, all things that are very kind of specific to the workplace and can have a big influence on wages. But outside of that becomes the next circle if you like are the factors that are at the society or the economy level that influence what happens happens in the workplace. And this is things like gender stereotypes. So when you think about the type of work or the type of occupations that men and women have. That's very much influenced by the kind of wider norms and stereotypes in society about what is appropriate work for women, what is appropriate work for men, and particularly around unpaid care works like working in the home. Who does the majority of that work and how is that work divided up. But also things like the state policy and support for for women's and men's education or girls and boys education, legal protections for women workers and for informal workers and other types of workers. And to what extent does the state provide protections that are going to influence the type of work that men and women do and how much they earn for that work, as well as a range of other policies like around minimum wages and maternity leave paternity leave and so forth. There are also indirect determinants at the global level and I think this is something that we're, we're, you know, quite unique in looking at because of our positioning at looking at global supply chains. You know, we're interested in what are the supply chain dynamics and the market dynamics that are going to impact on wages that come down, you know, through kind of pressures in the supply chain, for example, trade and investment policies that also can affect wages, as well So those are things like, you know, the well banana forum that the sustainable development initiatives human rights initiatives that are that are influencing practices of the workplace. So all of these things we're trying to look at as a way to understand gender pay gaps in a particular workplace or a particular sector. And, you know, it does require a mixed methods approach the bulk of the focus is on the direct determinants using payroll data. So we're trying to use interviews to try and get to some of this kind of root cause analysis. Next slide please. So, as Richard mentioned, we have five pilots gender pay gap studies, either kind of completed underway or about to start. So we have three in clothing in Turkey Bangladesh and Thailand, and two in agriculture in Columbia bananas and Morocco Berry sector. Please. So moving on to the study in Columbia. And next slide. I'm just going to say a few things about the methodology because Victor also kind of covered off most of this. So I think a couple of things to highlight. We were working with Fairtrade on this study. And so the selection of the two companies that took part in the study came from the pool that of Fairtrade certified companies. And we jointly developed criteria for deciding how to select those two companies. We also did a review of the kind of published information and secondary data on wages and employment in the banana growing region of Columbia. And also on gender dynamics in the country. Prior to designing the research if you like that informed the design of the research. We did some preliminary analysis of the payroll data so we, the companies were asked to send us some of the dates their payroll data in advance of going out to visit the companies and the plantations. And that kind of again allowed us to fine tune the methodology to understand what kind of data we needed to look for and ask for. So we did visits to the plantations as has been mentioned we not only collected the payroll data we also did interviews with the cross section of workers as well as with managers. And then we after having done the analysis we prepared a report for each company separately, which was a confidential report for those companies. And that gave the companies an opportunity to see how they were doing, but it also gave them an opportunity to feedback to us anything they had concerns about, or any provide any additional information that they felt we had missed. We then also did a validation with stakeholders, we had a really great workshop actually it was, it was a hybrid workshop and we had really good participation in the room and online from stakeholders in the industry. So that was a really important part of the process to get a wider kind of picture of what's going on in the sector and to just kind of sense check our findings against people's experiences more broadly in the sector. And then now we're at the stage step eight of disseminating the findings and there will be there's a very comprehensive report that will be made public. Next slide please. So just flagging up a couple of points. As I said, these are two companies selected by Fairtrade their case studies. We were not claiming that they're representative of the sector more broadly in Columbia. Having said that from from the validation workshop with stakeholders we do feel confident that there is quite a lot of commonality. In terms of the nature of the gender pay gap in the Colombian banana sector, and in the kind of determinants that we identified the main determinants we identified in the two areas that we were working in. So while not representative we do think that these findings are going to be relevant in other companies in the sector. We looked at payroll data across a year and a half, not only for operational workers but also for administrative workers including managers. That period covered a pre covid pandemic period, as well as during the peak of covid and post covid. And that was really important because obviously we know that the pandemic has had a huge effect on wages in many parts of the world. So that was really good to be able to look at wages over over the course of time that during that period. We've already spoken about the confidential reports that we deliver to each company. Richard talked about this access to payroll data. I think that is what makes this a particularly innovative methodology and the study is quite innovative because it is rare to get access to payroll data. And so this really gives you a level of detail that that you just wouldn't find in previous studies on gender pay gaps. So, you know, feel very strongly that this mixed methods approach is particularly important for any study on gender. You really do need to take a qualitative approach to it as well as, you know, getting the hard numbers which are equally important. And then finally, what's innovative about our approach is that it enables us to analyze the proportion of women and men who have a living wage using the anchor methodology. So this was quite a quite a lengthy analysis in and of itself actually just to do a very accurate measurement of the percentage of men and women who have a living wage in the two case study companies. Next slide please. So just moving then on to the context for the study in Columbia. So there's a couple of slides here based on national survey data. And just to give a sense of what this area of Columbia is like in terms of employment and wages. So this is for rural people who live in rural areas. And the chart on the left shows the labor force participation rates by gender. So this is the percentage of men and women who are in employment or looking for an employment. So what you see is that the size of the columns, the size that is in red is which represents women is smaller than the part that is blue which represents men. And this is effectively to say that men are almost twice as likely to be employed or looking for work as women. So just just to recap then women are less likely to be in employment or looking for work than men. But there are some differences between the three departments where bananas are grown for export. So in Guajira, there's a higher rate of women's participation in work. The chart on the right hand side relates to the percentage of workers who contribute to the state pension scheme. This is effectively an indicator of formality of employment. So if someone works, contributes to the state pension scheme, they can be classed as being in informal employment rather than informal employment. So we see from this chart that in rural areas, the percentage of workers who are in formal employment is very low between around 8% and 25%. The percentage is slightly lower for women, but it's also very low for men. And that's really just because in the banana sector in Colombia, what we find is that almost all workers are in formal employment. So they're already forming kind of a minority, if you like, compared to most workers in the region. Next slide please. So this slide is just to give you a bit of a taste of what we know about wages and the gender pay gap in the banana growing region. So for the three departments that we looked at, when we look at average wages for everybody in rural areas in those three departments, we find a gender pay gap of between 21% and 30%. Again, there's some differences between the three departments with a slightly bigger gender pay gap in Antiochia than in the other two departments. Next slide. So then finally, just in terms of setting the context, the wage system in any study, all of the pilot studies that we've done so far on gender pay gaps, but also other living in the living wage studies. The wage system varies very much from one sector to another, from one country to another, but also even between workplaces. So what we find in the Colombian banana exports sector is that across both of our case study companies, but generally in the sector, there is peace rate pay for operational workers. That's workers involved in production and packing and salaries, monthly salaries for administrative workers, including managers. There is group based remuneration for workers who are involved in harvesting and packing. So that means that the productivity of the harvesting and packing team as a whole determines how much individual workers will earn. There is also use of what's called a special shift or it's jornada especial in Spanish. It's a contract which allows flexibility in the number of days worked, and that's really because most plantations are not packing every day. And so they need the workforce size to be flexible to adjust to the amount of production demand. There were as well as those general commonalities across the two companies. There were some differences between the case study companies because one was part of an industry collective bargaining agreement between Al Gore and Cintra Inagro. And the other just had a company specific collective pact. So it's not a unionised plantation, but it does have a collective pact which sets out terms and conditions and wage rates. So the differences in those two agreements meant that the peace rate value for each activity varied between the two companies. The number of days that were guaranteed for special shift workers varied. And for the collective bargaining agreement, special shift workers have a guaranteed three days a week of work, whereas for the other company, there was no guaranteed number of days. The basis of the group-based pay differed between the two companies, whether or not harvesting, transport to the pack house and pack house were all considered as one group or two separate groups. And then there were also differences in terms of the kinds of benefits, extra-legal benefits of going beyond the law that workers had access to through the collective bargaining agreement and collective paths. In addition, the collective bargaining agreement has some provisions to promote gender equality and try and increase the amount of the number of women working in the banana sector. So that was also a difference in terms of context. But there were other differences that weren't just about the collective bargaining agreement and the collective pact. So there's differences just because of the location. So differences in the labour market dynamics in the two regions and differences in the cost of living. These things are all affecting wages as well as these kind of more direct influences on wages through collective bargaining and other types of wage agreements. So at that point, I'm going to hand over to Luisa to present the results. Thank you. Okay, so can we go to the next slide, please? Thank you. Well, the first thing we looked at was the gender composition of workers. One of the advantages of the payroll data is that it allows us to separate them between administrative and operational personnel, and this slide is showing the results. The bars in the left are showing the results for operational workers, which are very similar to the 12.5% reported from previous studies for the sector. But the first interesting finding from our methodology is that the proportion of women at administrative positions, which are the bars at the right, are different between plantations and are also high, especially for company A. This difference is related to the fact that both companies had headquartered offices in the capital of the department. So the administrative tasks are shared between headquarters and the plantations themselves. So they are not strictly comparable, but it is interesting the high proportion of women that are working directly at the plantations at company A. Next slide, please. When we look at the gender profile of workers, we find some positive aspects that we want to point it out with this slide. The first one is the higher level of employment for men and women between 41 and 50 years of age. It is also important to note that more than 60% of women and 50% of men are between 31 and 50 years of age in both companies. And also half of these workers in case of company B are between 41 and 50 years old. A high proportion of these workers in both companies have a permanent partner. And the average number of children is similar at both companies is like 2.5 children per worker. And also despite this high proportion of workers with a permanent partner, there is a relatively high proportional single mothers as well. And this is positive because this is evidence of non-discrimination in access to employment for these single mothers. Next slide, please. When we disaggregate the information into occupational groups, we find some differences between both companies. If we look at operational workers, which are the first four categories for each of the graphs. We verify something that is already known for the sector and that is that women are segregated into packing and cleaning activities while men do field and packing activities. One of the things that we found very interesting from the visits at the plantations is that it is a common practice in the sector to promote workers to be multifunctional. So they are in constant training of their current activities and other activities so they can be rotated between them when it's needed. For women this multifunctionality is reflected in packing activities, but for men it is reflected not only in packing but also in field activities. And this explains in part the differences in the higher proportion of workers in packing for company A when compared with company B. In terms of the administrative task force, we also see differences that are related to what I said before about the different composition of the administrative activities that are done in the plantations. When we look at the type of contracts, another positive aspect that we can highlight is related to the fact that most workers are on permanent contracts, but this is also related to the selection of these companies for this study. We also find that only 20% of workers are on fixed contracts and both companies use the special shift contract where women are most likely to be because of its design for packing activities. Next slide please. One of the advantages of having payroll data to do this analysis is that it allows us to differentiate the size of the gap between operational and administrative workers and between different types of payments that are, and these are the results that I'm going to present in the next slides. In this graph, we see the average annual gap for operational workers at both companies. The first thing to show is that company A has a higher gender gap than company B when we look at 2020 or if we look at the first six months of 2021 or if we see through the whole period. These gaps are higher and annually more variable than the ones found at company B and something that is worth mentioning here is that company A pays on average higher wages. So this is a very important result in terms of gender because this means that better payments do not necessarily behave equally between men and women. Also this variability between 2020 and 2021 in terms of company A is related to the fact that when we looked at the number of days that women work in so this month by month in 2021 women work more days than men in 2021 than in 2020. So this, I'm going to say this later on again, but if we can guarantee more days of work for women, these gaps will tend to reduce. In the next slide, we include information for both operational and administrative workers and the picture changes completely. As we saw before, when we consider only operational workers, what we found is that company A have higher wages, but when we introduce administrative workers, the gender gap reduces by more than a half. And increases like 2% point, 2% point this, ah, sorry, percentage points for company B. And this is because they have more women working in administrative tasks and as Sally mentioned before, they are paid similar salaries between men and women in administrative activities. So with this information in mind, we searched the data to identify potential direct determinants of these gaps. Exploring next slide please, sorry. No. Sorry. Okay, this is a summary of what I said so if my English is too bad. This is the summary in both companies women consistently earn less than men on average. The size of the gaps bar rise a lot month per month. This is something that you can see in the report with with other graphs that we do not bring here. But this is a correlated with fluctuations in production and market demands and also COVID-19 is in between our period of study so it also have an effect. As I mentioned before, paying higher wages to not necessarily imply that the gap that the gender gap is lower. And from our case studies. This is really evident when we see the behavior of this gap for operational workers. And the other interesting thing that we find that is not common in this kind of studies is to see the differences in the gap when you include not only operational but also administrative workers and in this case, the inclusion of the administrative workers reduces the gap for company a but increases the gap for company B. And the other important finding is related to living wages. We wanted to see with this wage levels. The proportion of men and women that could achieve a living wage and if there is a gender gap. Obviously, women are less likely to achieve a living wage. What we find is that 94% of men can achieve a living wage with the current wage structure and 77% of men in health women in both companies achieve a living wage. And this is a very important result because if you want to promote that these companies pay living wages, they have to make adjustments so they can see this through a gender lens. Louisa. Tell me. Sorry, I just have to interrupt you. Sorry. That result on the living wage is for company is just for one of the companies not for all workers. Oh, not for both companies. It was just for one of the companies. Yeah, correct. For the other. Yeah, you're right. In the other company. There were no workers achieving that living wage. Correct, Sally. Okay, so, um, next, we exploit the benefits of the payroll data to identify those direct determinants of the gender wage gaps. And we see it at least in three different ways. Next slide please. We see it in terms of the activities performed, then in the different types of payments that a workers can help. The amount of time work and the, and here we have a big difference with traditional quantitative works because we usually like to see this amount of time measured in hours but here because of the ways of the different ways activities are done in the banana sector. These companies do not recall the exact number of hours. They actually work on a regular day. They only have track of the overtime payments. We also look at the types of contract and we use age as a proxy for experience. And in these two last cases, we're not going to show you the direct results, but you can check them on the final report. So, next slide. In terms of the activities performed, what you are seeing in these graphs are the average annual salaries for men and women, red for women, blue for men. We can see that in all of the activities that women participate with the exception of cleaning for company B, which is a very small group. In general, women are less than men. As I mentioned before, in company A, the level of wages is higher. So these scales are not as strictly comparable between companies. Next slide please. And here we do a very interesting exercise, exploding the information of the payroll data. In the last two columns of the slide on the right, we have the average gender pay gap as I presented you a couple of slides before. And what we do is we desegregate the information of the payroll data into the regular payments, which are the two first bars on the chart. And compare it with the complete gap, including all types of payments. These are overtime payments. And also bonuses and allowances that are of free access to all the workers without considerations of specific characteristics. These are the general ones. So when we see this chart, if we only looked at the regular payments excluding overtime, these bonuses and allowances we see smaller gaps for both companies being the narrowing of the gap higher for company B than for company A. And we see in the bars in the middle, the behavior of the gaps just for overtime pay, which are the second group of bars of the chart. What this shows us is that overtime payments do influence the gap to be bigger when you see the complete picture of wages. And also there is a difference between both companies in terms of the bonuses and allowances that women and men are allowed to earn. One important thing that we got from the stakeholder validation is that women are reluctant to accept overtime because of their double journey between home and work. Next slide, please. Another thing we looked at was the number of days work for both men and women. And what we see here is that women on average work less regular days, one day less. And they also have more sick leave days and pay leave days in general. So when we add these three facts and added to another fact that is stated here in the gray rectangles for each group is that women do less days with overtime. As I mentioned before, because they are not willing to do them because of their double journey, they have more sick leave days and more pay leave days. So if you put this all together, that means that they're earning less because this sick leave days and pay leave days are paid at a lower rate that are that regular work days. And the picture is similar for Company B. The only difference that we find in the next slide is that for women that have fixed terms, they work one day more than the rest of the groups. So in the report next slide, please. You would also find that we calculated gender pay gaps, depending on the types of contract that the workers have. And although we find some differences, we really believe that those differences are more associated with the three things that we saw in the slides before, which are the activities performed, the different types of payments that they have, which are overtime and bonuses are analysis, and the differences in this time work and leave payments. In terms of experience, these companies do not have a complete record of the experience of the worker, mainly the previous experience before they got into their companies. So what we did was to correlate salaries and age to see whether there was this traditional inverted U-related experience and wages. And what we find is that there was not this evidence of an inverted U, but a flat line which shows no correlation between age and salaries. And what we, and the explanation for this is basically that experience is a condition for access employment into these companies, but it's not remunerated higher, but in a fixed way because of the way they have a structure, the piece rates for each of the activities. So this is the information of the quantitative data. And we mixed this information with field visits in order to identify indirect determinants of these gender pay gaps. Next slide, please. And for this, we have previously done a desk work in order to find some works on this issue for the Colombian region. And we find a 2004 study published by the National Union School where 60 women workers from Urabah were interviewed. And the findings back then was that 90% of them experienced a differential treatment depending on age, looks or their personal relationship to the coordinator. And also 75% of them reported not to have time because of the double journey to participate in different associations or committees to have a voice on their own, how to improve their work conditions. Despite being 18 years old, this study helped us to understand it as a baseline to see what has changed at what is constant in terms of this workplace culture and gender notes and stereotypes. So in terms of workplace culture, one of the things that must be mentioned is that since 2015, there is a new regulation that makes companies, that forces companies to have offices of occupational health safety. And these offices train workers in order to reduce their activity risks and also they work in promoting a better working environment. And what we see from the interviews is that this actually improved the perception of men and women being equal at the workplace. So in both plantations that said we are equal and the workers repeat this as a mantra, basically. So that's a first sign of improvement. However, when you began the interviews, something really particular happened to us. In one of the plantations, we were really close to the pack house and workers of the pack house used to put music very loud. So if they want to communicate to one another, they basically have to yell in order for their voice to be here above this loud music. And when we were doing the interviews, some of them began to talk and the women we were interviewing noticed this and said, you know what they're doing, they are suggesting that we should get back to our work. And for younger women, this was not a problem and they ignore it. But for older women, it was an issue and they say, well, they have already been interviewed. So why don't they respect our time doing this interview? What are they afraid of? So this is to say that despite the promotion of the quality in the workplace, there are still some issues to work with workers because in practice, they do not feel like they are equal and they are asking women to either do not take all the time. They actually took on our interviews or to do something more in terms of their work. Also, in terms of representation of women in different associations, what we find is that it is still very difficult for women to be part of this company committees or representatives. In the case of the unionized company to be a voice representative of the company at Cintra in Agro. And the reason is not that the administration do not promote women for these positions, but they still feel afraid or think that men would not let them speak for themselves in this kind of committees. Another finding was that it is very important the work of Cintra in Agro in trying to solve all these issues. In the unionized company, it is clear in the collective agreement the idea that the company must work to improve the gender balance of their workers and they promote the hiring of new women workers when they have enough abilities to do the job. And this is very important. And this is a first step towards gender equality. However, one step further would be to monitor how these new hires behave in time. And so far, Cintra in Agro is really concentrated of improving women employment in the sector. But in the future, they have to also monitor how stable these new hires are. I don't know if I am missing something here, Sally. Maybe just to mention the limitation, the third bullet point down, that we found that some women had previously, one of the limitations which Luisa has spoken about is that women don't engage in field activities. And field activities are generally paid at a higher rate than the kinds of activities that women are engaged in. And when we kind of interrogated the reasons why women don't engage in field activities, there are various reasons including the gender norms and stereotypes around this type of work. But there was some women who said that they had previously worked applying fertilizers and we were told that that wasn't allowed by the certification standards because of the risk to reproductive health. But it seemed from conversations with experts in the sector that actually that was maybe a misinterpretation of the standard. And it's something that needed to be clarified with companies and with the certification standards to identify when or what kinds of safety measures need to be in place to enable women to participate in those activities should they wish to do so. And I think that's probably sufficient. Just one little thing extra. When we validated the results with the stakeholders, we find something that was not evident in the interviews with these companies and is that episodes of sexual harassment are still common in the sector. There are not, they were not reflected in our interviews, but our stakeholders all raised their hands and said there are still, this is still happening and we have some more work to be done in this area. So, these are basically the results we wanted to share with you. I don't know if we need something else Sally. No, I don't think so. Okay. So now it's time for the public to pose all the questions you have. Hopefully my English is good enough to be understandable for all of you. But it's not we, this is the chance to clarify all doubts that you may have. Yes, thank you, Luis and Sally. I see there's a hand raised here on a Maria Benitez. I don't know if it was raised from before. Okay, so I see that we have, I believe it was Marguerita Romanelli first so Marguerita please go ahead. Hello, hello to everybody. Thank you very much for the presentation are very interesting. I have some couple of questions very short regarding the methodology. If how many women were interviewed directly. And if you think that those interview give you the opportunity to verify what is written in the payroll, it is confirmed by the reality. And on the other hand, that is very, very much connected. If you ever discover that as a salary gap, there is can be affected by this in assistance of a gray zone. And I mean with the gray zone when the salary is correlated to a certain number of hours or days that you find in the payroll. But into the reality, people, the women has to work much more days or hours. In that case, the salary gap is higher. It happens, for example, in agriculture in Italy, that is a problem. So then I would like to understand if there is also in the context. And the last question, sorry for many questions. The very last question is regarding if you have a final doubt, any correlation among the status of maternity, the status of to be a mother with a salary gap. So if there is any correlation among these two categories, because in another research in Italy among migrant women, there is a correlation. Thank you very much. So it means that the women that are mother are much more exploited than the other in our research. Thank you. Sally, would you get that or? I can answer some of it. So let me just and then you can then you can also add on. So in terms of the number of women interviewed, I mean, there aren't the number of women in each company is actually very small. And Louisa, sorry, you'll have to remind me, I think you interviewed all of the women. All of the women that were working that day, but that was a low demand packing day. So not all workers were there. But I think we interviewed like 16 women per day on average in both foundations. And just in terms of whether that was an opportunity to verify the payroll sufficiently. I mean, I'm not quite sure if you're asking whether we whether we had any reason to doubt that the payroll data was reliable. And the answer to that is no, there was no reason to suspect that the payroll data was in any way manipulated, which is a common thing, you know, in many countries and many sectors of double books. And but there was no reason to suspect that in this case, whether the gender pay gap was affected. I wasn't 100%. I'm not 100% sure I understood your question, but I think you're asking whether if we were able to take into account time worked, whether effectively women were working for less per hour. Then then men I'm not sure if that's what you were asking. No, perhaps you could just repeat that bit of the question but I'll just come to the last thing the correlation between motherhood and the gender pay gap we didn't find a correlation. Effectively, almost, I mean, as Louisa presented, almost all workers, both men and women had children, which was interesting because of the kind of age range that we were looking at, you know, most of them were in the kind of middle age range to kind of 40 type range, and most workers had had children. And so there wasn't a correlation there that we found that was associated with parental status. Louisa, Louisa, do you want to add anything to that and I don't know if you understood the second question better than I did. If I understood correctly, the other question was related to the days or hours and the correlation with salary. What we did was to look at the number of days per month that men and women were working. And you can see this in the complete report and then we compare it with the wage gap. And what we can see was that for those months where women work more days, the gap was reduced and even reduced to zero in one of those months. This is also related to demand. If you do not have packing activities to do or if the level of packing activities is low, given the way that these persons in packing are remunerated, it is different to reduce the gap. But what we do see is that the more days of women work, the gap is reduced. I'm not sure that answers your question. Yes, thank you. My question was very much close to the risk that there were some days or hours not considered, calculated into the payroll. So in that case, of course, the salary gap would have been increased. But since you replied me that there is any risk or any doubt on this risk relating the possibility of having some days not accounted into the payroll. So then this question doesn't make sense. So my question doesn't make sense. So then thank you for the adding some other elements with your place. Great. Thank you, Margarita. We will move on then to the next. I see there's four other hands raised. So first we will give the floor to Adela Torres and Señor Emerson Aguirre, and we can continue with Cesar and Iris. Señor Adela, por favor. Hola, muy buenos días. Yo soy Adela Torres y soy dirigente sindicado de Centroinágono en el sector bananero en Colombia. Primerando el estudio que se ha realizado a través de esta consultoría, vemos varios elementos que de pronto voy a permitirme compartir. Si, lo que dices en el tema del estudio que las mujeres son menos que los hombres, eso es cierto, pero en el tema salarial, también con el tema por la misma jornada y algunos contratos que se tienen, por ende se gana quizás menos que los hombres, pero no es porque la mujer tiene un precio diferencial en el trabajo, sino que es por los días de trabajo, como ustedes lo explicaban, por los días de trabajo que se tiene, entonces por eso se gana menos, pero digamos que el día de trabajo en un empaque, las mujeres van a ganar igual que los hombres, no ganan las mujeres, por decir algo, 20 dólares, los hombres 25, no, si son 25, todo gana 25. La diferencia es por los días de trabajo. Y lo decía en tu presentación, bueno, porque las mujeres a veces prefieren, es un sistema que tenemos especial con el sector bananero, el tema de contratación especial, así se llama jornada especial, porque precisamente cuando se dio mucho el tema de la violencia, pues las mujeres asumieron ese rol de trabajar en la finca y el rol de ser mamá y estar en casa, entonces a veces para un día para que ellas pudieran atender. Bueno, en el tema de la salud de que las mujeres se ausentan más, y si me hubiese gustado de punto que o una recomendación porque cogieron dos fincas, y en dos fincas creo que no puede quedar como que eso es lo que se gana. Creo que en el sector bananero hay menos mujeres en el tema de un sentimo por enfermedad que los hombres, por ejemplo, porque los hombres son más caros, nosotros tenemos un porcentaje de mujeres del 8.3%, entonces se va a ver que van a haber mucho más hombres enfermos que las mismas mujeres. En ese caso, cuando una mujer está incapacitada, porque realmente a veces tiene problemas serios ya con el tema de castes de mango rotador o túnel, o algunas enfermedades, pero en nuestro que hacer diario que estamos en todo este proceso constantemente, miramos que el tema de las mujeres es menos incapacitante que los hombres. Nosotros, a través de nuestras negociaciones con el empresario bananero, hemos venido haciendo un proceso para incrementar el número de mujeres en las políticas que más mujeres están trabajando porque no está el porcentaje que de pronto quisiéramos que hubiese en la finca. Por eso el sector y el sindicato ha venido haciendo un trabajo de que en las convenciones colectivas se metan cláusulas para que las mujeres sean contratadas. Se ha encontrado, digamos que en algunos casos podemos decir que el 70% ha cumplido, de pronto un 30%, pues todavía no llega a cumplir el proceso, pero lo estamos haciendo. Igualmente con contratos, que verdaderamente pues este contrato las mujeres tengan un salario que le justifique el trabajo, pero que también puedan resolver el tema de sus familias. Además de eso hemos contratado muchos convenios con otras empresas, aparte las negociaciones para hacer una contratación muy significativa que fue en el 2019. Entonces en ese caso creo que yo sé que usted hace una investigación y pues al azar unas fincas, de pronto, no sé, tampoco pues se nos consultó, digamos, como a la dirigencia sindical, pero bueno yo sé que de pronto lo hacen ustedes así porque para de pronto tener este estudio y por eso estamos está asocianizando. Entonces creo que en ese caso que también resulta muy significativo el tema de la cosa sexual en la finca pero también es la cosa laboral para las mujeres. También es bastante importante que todo eso se tenga en cuenta. Más mujeres en la empacadora, por ejemplo las mujeres, las labores que las mujeres hacen son más en la empacadora. Son pocas las mujeres que hacen labores de campo por el grado de complejidad que a veces se tiene y por la misma condición de la mujer. Entonces por eso hay más mujeres en la empacadora y muchos hombres que en el campo, que son los que costan los racismos y hacen todo el proceso de mantenimiento de la finca, son hombres. Son muy pocas las mujeres que van al campo para no ser que van a ser abonos, pero que también es complejo porque un bull de abono pesa 50 kilos y entonces para una mujer a veces les queda muy pesada. Entonces como este tipo de labores y algunas otras labores como el de Zoge que también en algunas empresas que también utilizan algunas mujeres para realizar esta labor. Creo que el estudio de 2004 es un estudio que hicimos nosotros como organización sindical juntamente con la escuela nacional sindical donde hicimos un estudio sobre derechos laborales sexual y reproductivo de las trabajadoras del sector pananero, pero ese es un estudio, como tú dices ya hace 18 años, pero lo estamos incluso, yo acabo de hacer un estudio también y actualizamos mirando el antes y el después, como estaban las mujeres en el 2004 y como estaban a 2021, que lo culminamos ahorita en 2022, entonces hicimos esas comparaciones con el tema de la contratación de mujeres porque ha sido como uno de los pilares fundamentales de la organización sindical y que luego llevaba las negociaciones conjuntamente con la empresa y se que muchos empresarios han avalado esta participación de mujeres en la empresa porque muchas mujeres cabezas de familia que requieren tener también un sustento para ellos entonces creo que valioso pues el estudio que se hace pero sé que faltan muchos elementos para poder llegar al tema de salario digno con el tema de lo que hoy tenemos como te digo el estudio que hice el año pasado siendo la comparación, pero si en el tema salarial es eso porque la brecha salarial porque las mujeres no trabajan todos los días pero en materia de día de pago se gana igual que lo que es eso, gracias Muchas gracias Adela, no sé si Luisa o Sally tienen algún comentario para Adela Creo que hay dos elementos para aclarar respecto a la presentación y a los días remunerados sea por enfermedad o sea por licencia y es algo que menciona Adela es que en algunas otras fincas el ausentismo masculino es superior al femenino y eso es cierto, pero también es cierto que ese ausentismo no está relacionado con pago en el caso de los hombres el ausentismo masculino está relacionado con el hecho de que los días, el lunes después del día de pago los trabajadores suelen no asistir a las plantaciones y la ausencia no es justificada o sea simplemente lo que dicen es que se gastan todo su salario en el fin de semana y pues no llegan porque estaban de fiesta básicamente y eso no se observa en estas gráficas porque estas gráficas están basadas en los días que las empresas reconocen como pagos justificados por enfermedad o por alguna otra razón, entonces por eso aparecen las diferencias en los días pero gracias Adela por mencionarlo porque esto debía haberlo hecho más claro durante la presentación y otro aspecto que también menciona Adela frente a esta segregación de trabajos de hombres y de mujeres también debía haberlo mencionado antes y gracias Adela por señalarlo es que incluso para algunos coordinadores y para parte del personal administrativo todavía es impensable pensar en alternativas para que las mujeres participen en el campo y era lo que Adela mencionaba previamente sobre que las mujeres están concentradas principalmente en las labores de empaque y en esto pues esta segunda parte en la que saliva presentar las recomendaciones del estudio creo que Adela se adelantó un poco a esas, a esas elementos que están incorporados en las recomendaciones pues simplemente para decir que todavía hay trabajo por hacer en ese aspecto y en eso es clave no solo el papel de Cintra y Nagros sino también el papel de Clac principalmente porque en el Magdalena donde las fincas son un poco más pequeñas y quizás los recursos para este tipo de capacitación son menores tampoco hay una presencia tan masiva de los sindicatos entonces Clac puede ser un agente importante para ayudar a corregir este tipo de estudio no sé si Salí tienes algunos comentarios adicionales no, I think very pertinent and helpful comments from Adela but I think you're right Luisa, I mean some of the points that you've touched on Adela are things that we have taken into consideration in the recommendations and also are highlighting as best practices or good practices rather so perhaps that will be reflected in the next section of the presentation I mean I think it's the point about whether the two case studies are representative of the sector I mean I think we are very clear that this is, we're not claiming that they are representative the number of sick days as Luisa has spoken about there's a difference between the unauthorised and authorised absences but even if the number of sick days paid sick days are not representative or not typical should we say that was a very small factor in the gender pay gap I think if it had been something that we thought was a really major factor we wouldn't we would have maybe been more cautious in the way we were presenting that because as you say there are just case studies but I think a combination of those two, the two aspects that it's not having a major impact on the gender pay gap and also we weren't accounting for unauthorised absences and we didn't feel that there was a need to kind of ignore those results if you like but I think other than that just very useful comments for everybody in the room to hear Emerson? La que se analizó El tercero La diferencia o dentro del estudio lo contemplaron presentar la diferencia salarial entre una mujer de la guajira y una mujer de Urabá porque no lo veo en el estudio y lo tercero acudiendo a las palabras que menciona Dela y que ustedes ha mencionado si es válido hacer una encuesta para complementar este estudio si realmente hay interés alto, mediano o bajo de aumentar la participación desde las mujeres en las actividades en campo sería muy importante hacer esa encuesta muchas gracias ok Emerson respecto a la finca en guajira si tiene un sindicato en cuanto a lo que dices de seguridad social en términos de mercado laboral a cuando la firma hace los aportes a salud y a pensiones normalmente eso se considera formalidad y cuando esas dos cosas se pagan indirectamente también se están pagando no significa que estas empresas o que en general la definición omita la existencia de las esentías si existe frente a las diferencias entre cuánto van a una mujer en promedio en Urabá y en guajira no hicimos el cálculo explícito y no analizamos esas diferencias porque finalmente estos son casos de estudio el número de mujeres es pequeño para esto sería más interesante un estudio mucho más amplio tenemos que ser un primer piloto para verificar si la metodología funciona o no pero en los cuadros tú puedes ver en el reporte esos salarios promedio de mujeres en ambas empresas entonces se podría hacer perfectamente el cálculo lo que pasa es que hay que tener cuidado con la interpretación de esa valor porque no es representativo entre las regiones y finalmente en términos de las encuestas de interés por las actividades repítenme porza si las mujeres quieren trabajar más menos horas o en distintas actividades de campo correcto? si, si quieren o no están por participación o si les llaman la atención o como es el grado de llamarle la atención de entrar en esas actividades donde su presencia no es tan alta si actividad es de... no es masiva la respuesta sobre interés si hagamos en esto en las entrevistas en campo y el interés no es masivo pero pensando en estrategias para mejorar el balance de género a largo plazo no importa que sea masivo el interés si es pequeño lo que uno puede pensar es en estrategias para incorporar a estas mujeres que si tienen interés en las actividades de campo y en la medida en que vayamos incorporando estas mujeres a esas actividades ellas liberan un cupo que también puede ser aprovechado por nuevas contrataciones por parte de las empresas y así mejorar el balance de género hay algunas que dicen mire yo prefiero estas actividades sobre todo porque esto me evita los problemas de potenciales chismes o abladurías en empaque entonces si existe el interés pero no es masivo con gusto es esa can I just clarify one thing no maybe I misunderstood what you said Luisa but if the question was whether the plantation in Guajira was unionised the answer is no I think Luisa you said that yes it is unionised but that's the plantation in Uruba is unionised and the plantation in Guajira was not unionised I just wanted to make sure that was clear thank you for clarifying that and just to add on to what you said about women's interest in doing field activities and I think this is something that comes up again and again in any kind of gender study in agriculture is some kind of ideas that women don't want to do field work because it's harder it's sometimes exposed to the sun sometimes they're physically less able to do it and all of those reasons are valid and it's not that we would ever say that women should be getting forced into doing work that they don't want to do there are some barriers that are created not only from you know the way things like for example the example of the certification standards that puts limits on the type of work that women do or can put limits on the type of work that women do but there are also limits that people place on themselves without knowing the way things have always been done a belief in the ability of men and women to do certain types of work in the same way that it's often said that women make better parents or better mothers it's well proven that men can look after babies as well as women can look after babies and it's the same I think for a lot of differentiation of activities in agriculture you can go to another country where women will be much more engaged in field work field activities and so you know yes there are preferences and yes there are physical differences that we're not trying to deny but there are also other aspects that could be addressed through questioning some of these assumptions and that's really what we're trying to say Good morning everyone I wanted to ask a question about what was the reason behind the study that was not taken into account by the Cintra Inagro which is a very representative syndical organization in Colombia and that has collective negotiations where they have improved the working conditions of men and women that would be one of the questions the other question is if within the study they were able to establish the hours of work in ordinary and extraordinary that the workers and in the farm where the guajira mentioned that there is no syndicate what is the extraordinary day and if it's fulfilled with those limits that the law establishes the group also took into account for this study I see that the group was very small of a number of banana workers from Colombia which is the fourth country more producer of banana or third or fourth country more producer of banana from Latin America then as it was very small the number of workers that were taken into account for that study since we also know that the workers as well as Adela said do not work every day because that will depend that the company has more market solicitudes then when the market opens there is more market therefore the workers are going to work more days a week then it can be that that is going to increase a little but the situation that I wanted to know is that part because we know that in what oraba because it is already regulated some of the conditions but if you found that type of difference between one and another Cesar I do not have very clear what is the reason for which it states that we do not consider to be true in fact we interviewed Adela to understand a little better what all these actions will be and the way they were taken here and monitored in the case of the farm located in and all the positive actions present in the collective convention are exposed within the work in terms of the working hours perhaps this in English did not understand very well but what I mentioned is that we analyzed working days and this has a reason and it is that the day of law applies but in the days of when the impact is low they can come out people can come out sooner then they do not keep a record of exactly how many hours of the legal working day indeed they work but they only count the extra hours that they have to pay according to the law and that are reflected in the data denominated that we received and those are the data I do not know if each thousand you can return a little to the rights and to the disaggregation of the rights for type of work this green bar thanks to that the extra hours or the time of extra hours is registered in the data denominated is that we can calculate these bars of the second block that are the pay of extra time of the workers but in terms of the total hours of work we can not do a calculation because although it is established a day of law from 8 to 5 the workers in days of impact of low demand can be coming out at 2 or 3 in the afternoon which was what we observed in the field I do not know if that answers the question of the hours worked and in terms of days thanks Camila if we can return to the working days these horizontal bars it is true that women work less days and that is related to that not every day is made impact but something surprising is that when you compare the workers are also working in the field the difference is not much and that happens in both in both companies even though they have different days of impact in both cases I do not know if that resolves your concerns César yes maybe somewhere I do not know how you see in relation to when you do this type of study the number to which to go thanks for thanks for remembering something that was not clear in the presentation is that this is a first pilot of the methodology Sally mentioned at the beginning when she showed the map the different places where these pilots are doing then part of our interest was to perfect the methodology especially that relationship between the name and the questions that we were going to do in the field which is also related to the previous intervention and that is the reason why at this time they selected two but clearly if this work is of interest something that we should do in the future is to expand the number of participants in these studies I agree with you thank you very much Sally I do not know if you have any other comment no but Camilla has just flagged that we've only got 15 minutes left so I think if it's possible to just present the recommendations and then any further questions could perhaps go in the chat I will answer while you present the recommendations in the commentary that we identified quite a number of good practices in the Colombian banana industry and this was not only our case study companies but also from the stakeholder workshop as well as the general kind of literature around the sector and so we really wanted to highlight these good practices as things that are already being done they're tried and tested if you like and certainly could be relevant for other companies in Colombia but elsewhere as well other parts of the world so some of these things we've already talked about the fact that most workers were on permanent contracts including workers who are on these special shifts and also the collective bargaining agreement guarantees a minimum of three days of work for workers on special shift contracts these are certainly very good practices that you wouldn't always see in this kind of sector the fact that workers are trained in different activities to be multifunctional I mean that has more of a benefit for men in the sense that men are trained across both packing activities and field activities and so they have a greater ability to increase their wages if you like by increasing the number of days worked and the number of activities that they engage in but nevertheless it's beneficial for both men and women because it means that they can earn more they can do things other than just packing one of the farms that created an apprentice coordinator role specifically in order to try and encourage women into those management positions the key management positions and that was working effectively there were some explicit actions that have been spoken about in the collective bargaining agreement to promote women's participation in the sector and also some companies had tried hiring or specifically identifying jobs that they were targeting women for as a way to promote women's employment the occupational health and safety offices that Luisa referred to as being a part of national regulation that's a really good practice so long as the promotion of gender equality and a good working environment is included as part of their responsibilities which it was in the case of our case study companies and that's something that we think is a good way to mainstream a focus on an ongoing focus on gender equality in the workplace and then there was an example of a company an exporter that was actually monitoring wages in a very detailed way to ensure that workers were earning a living wage and looking at this on an individual worker basis and as we have said in our presentation you know achievement of a living wage is a gendered issue because it is the case that fewer women achieve a living wage currently in our case study companies than men and this is the same we're finding this in other of the pilot studies as well and so this practice of monitoring wages is certainly something we would see as a good practice as long as it's also recognised that there's a gender aspect to it so next slide please and then there were also some recommendations that are really derived from the broader analysis the statistical analysis and other analysis that we did and one of those is the need to really cross-check that the pay rates for different activities have been decided in a gender neutral way it's very common around the world for the types of work that women do to be valued less than the types of work that men do and we didn't look at this in that much detail and it may well be in the case of Columbia because you have a collective bargaining agreement that the pay rates have been agreed in a or decided on in a gender neutral way but we would suggest that the sector to a gender neutral job evaluation of all the typical activities in banana plantations looking at things like the skill level the type of responsibility the the kind of physicality of work and other aspects of the activity to assign it a value and there are methodologies for doing this that are well known but it is quite a comprehensive job to do and it was beyond the scope of our value beyond the scope of our study but that really is where you would get to equal pay for work of equal value as Adela very rightly said women are not being paid differently for the same activity from men but it is possible we don't know that women are paid or the work that women does is valued less than the work that men do so that's something we think should be looked at there are a lot of training programs in place lots of good practices around training at the companies that we looked at but also that we heard of more generally in the sector and we just feel that some of those training programs could be expanded so training women in field activities as we've talked about already that's something that is beyond women's imagination sometimes but there are women who are interested extending the training on gender stereotypes and sexual harassment and other forms of gender based violence is necessary because there are ongoing issues for that training women it was raised that there's a perception that women if there's too many women working together there's conflict in the pack house and that women can't get along and a lot of that appears to be based on stereotypes some of it may be based on reality nevertheless training on conflict resolution we think would be useful way to address that and to start addressing attitudes towards hiring women in large numbers and then also the trying to address this issue of women being still being less able to participate actively and effectively in workers committees and associations and that is something that has already been worked on and we just think it needs further attention clarifying the requirements of certification standards is an obvious thing to do which I think would be quite a straightforward thing to do just to make sure that there isn't a barrier to women's employment where there shouldn't be next slide please and and then and then perhaps some more things that are you know some of these perhaps more controversial so you know currently we don't believe that women have equal opportunities as men to participate in field activities for various reasons and so there is an argument that most packing activities should be reserved for women without at the same time introducing barriers that would be discriminatory against other types of workers for example men who have long term physical disabilities often as a result of the work in the field are reassigned into the pack house and those men should always have that opportunity obviously to continue their employment but we do think that there is a case to be made until such time as there are equal opportunities for women to have preference in the pack house also another perhaps controversial recommendation would be to look at the balance of remuneration for packing activities and other activities that women are engaged in such as cleaning with respect to remuneration for field work which pays at a higher rate if you're looking at the amount earned for a regular working day and then this also kind of links back to the doing an evaluation of jobs a proper evaluation of jobs to make sure that this equal pay for work of equal value one thing that Louisa talked about and Adele also raised about this causes of absenteeism for women and for men we picked up that there are different causes and therefore that means that there are different solutions to try and reduce absenteeism and the very common cause of absenteeism amongst women is that their family responsibilities and the need for women to have greater access for example to flexible types of working arrangements or emergency leave emergency leave sorry for care work is something that could be looked at as a way to mitigate that more generally we feel like there should be more monitoring of wages broken down into the types of activities performed and the type of the time worked so that we can really kind of get as we've repeatedly said data that is beyond two case studies that we've looked at data that's relevant for the whole sector to have a better understanding of causes of gender pay gaps and then to really start trying to address these things having companies planning horizons a strategy to address the main causes of gender pay gaps that is in accordance with the capacities of each company and their specific situations we would like to see the pilot extended to Magdalena department and that's because we were told by stakeholders that the conditions are quite different that not only they have smaller plantations and small producer organization type plantations there is potentially a different kind of forms of employment there that should be looked at if we want to have a better view of the sector and then finally this question of looking at the link between wages and production cycles and gender pay gaps we were only able to do that to a very limited extent we didn't have extensive data on production and demand and we think that this is a really important aspect to look at so that we can kind of link this all back to markets and look at the solutions that might be linked to how supply chains operate so those are our kind of top recommendations I'm very sorry that we haven't got more time to discuss them because it would have been very useful to hear people's views but if we haven't got a few minutes and anyone's willing to stay a bit longer I'm sure Louisa and I would be very happy to answer any questions and or hear any other suggestions thank you Sally perhaps maybe we can see if Edie still has a question Edie, if you still have a question we would like to give you the floor if you want to ask the question you had before Edie, can you hear us? Here in Camila excuse me I was giving you the floor if you still want to make your comment when you had raised your hand before Good morning everyone Mungiri Mungia from Honduras I think it's important all the studies that are made and more in this sense when we're talking about a study about the gender or salary maybe I came in a bit late and maybe I didn't hear well the terms that were taken into account for the suggestions or the elements that were taken into account to define the vital salary or it was taken as a reference the dignified salary of today then it seems very important to me and in all of this I have two more elements that I think are important for for us as women because when I think it's a good point when we're talking about comparing the working days because from there we're looking at that women don't benefit or we have less guarantees we can say less guarantees in terms of working days for example if they bring us in the department of impact there are only two days cut to the week only two days we work we don't have to guarantee two days as they have to guarantee the companions because the companions have to guarantee their six days per week when they don't work in the department then they send them to work in agriculture then at least there it's guaranteeing four days of salary for men I think it's important that point because we have to look for the guarantee of working days for women because if there are activities that we as women can do in the field and we have done it in reiterated occasions for example the cut of the malleza which is called fertilizer but we have to discuss with the certifiers I don't know why looking from the point of view of the reproduction of women I agree with a woman with advanced months of salary she can't go to agriculture because the fields are a bit arctic and there are some issues but I think within the impact if there is work in the impact women can guarantee the work within the same impact if there is work but sometimes there is work in the impact but since there is a rotation of work then suddenly men are going to work but women are not going to work in the impact so I think these are things we have to go analyzing and we have to go with the same businessmen to see from what point of view we can improve the situation but it seems interesting because at least I leave it very clear the study the other thing that I think we have to take into account is how do we compare where there is a syndicate and where there is no syndicate for women because that is also important to serve as a reference also because here what we are looking for how we are improving when there are good practices how we are putting them in process in different countries that is the elementary because here in Honduras most of the ones we work in the impact are women because here there is a person of 200 women 150 or 170 are women and 30 are men so most are women who work in the impact department but in agriculture they work only men so there have been occasions that have sent us women to work at the farm but in case of need or when some hurricane or some issue that women have completely left without work then they look for a solution from that point of view but it seems to me that there are some elements with which we have to go also working there good in terms of reference salary Iris the Institute of Anchorage had made a calculation of the vital salaries for the region of Magdalena Antioquia y Guajira so that was the one that was used as reference for the calculation of dignified salaries in terms of working days we agree and perhaps that is the reason why in the recommendations Sally the reason of this companies normally keep a record of that information but that information is not used to promote measures that prevent women from having these absence in work and in terms of working days that are guaranteed for men and women it is important to ensure equality of conditions in those working days and not only in the days of packing because in those cases depending on the demand women will have a disadvantage and in terms of the certifiers as Sally mentioned also in the presentation of the recommendations of the study it seems that there were mistakes in the interpretation of the norm that have been discussed by the organizations but it is not yet massive the clarification of how the norm operates and it is important that not only the administration knows it but also the workers know it as you mentioned because only with the knowledge that they can make an enforcement of the real possibility that exists for women to participate in these activities that historically participated and now they are a little marginated by the effect of these new regulations so it is completely in agreement with what they are mentioning of the working days and the certifiers I don't know if Sally has any extra comment regarding the intervention of Iris and we are running over time so we should probably see whether people want to stay on for a bit longer obviously a lot of people have already had to leave Camilla do you want to just check in Yes, thank you there were some other comments that I think were translated in English and Spanish in the chat so I think the participants were able to read through those there was just one more question regarding which company was the one that was unionized and the one that was not one specifically about Sintra and Agro apologies which one was Agura and Sintra and Agro company A or B is what the this is what they were asking but I guess I'm not sure that this can be shared Yeah, I mean we intentionally didn't want the study to be a comparison of unionized non unionized plantations you know because that wasn't the focus of the study to understand the effect of unionization on the gender pay gap obviously there are aspects that came up that were very much linked to whether the study was unionized or not specifically in relation to the value of activities and the level of wages and I think it's you know well known that the wages in the Urabah area where the plantations are most unionized are higher than in other parts in the other departments so I think we you know without revealing anything we can say that but we've specifically not kind of compared a unionized with a non unionized plantation because there are other factors that affect wages as I set out in the opening comments you know the local labor market dynamics the local cost of living all of these things can affect wages and we didn't want to make this because it wasn't the focus of the study I think we would have had to do additional things to really verify the the influence of unionization on the gender pay gap vis-à-vis other things and with just two case studies it also wouldn't have been appropriate so we're not revealing it directly but I think anyone that reads the report would probably be quite easily identify which company is which great thank you Sally so I see that there were no other questions or in the chat and given that we've already run over I think perhaps we can already run to the go to the closing remarks so on behalf of the research institute I wonder whether perhaps we can give the floor to the anchors in case they'd like to give some closing remarks and then we will just share a few words as well yeah I mean first of all just to thank Louisa and Sally for all this work and all this information I mean that's the first thing it's important to say the other is that I think that judging from the comments I think there's some a little bit of misunderstanding of the study and that the methodology and study was to find out what the situation is in different companies and it wasn't to generalize to the sector I mean obviously you always try and generalize whatever you can because everybody's interested in more generalized stuff but I think that the the results you're seeing justify the approach and methodology and that is the companies were different these two companies which meant that they had different gender pay gaps they had different determinants of the gender pay gap and that's the message which I take away and I think it's important you know breaking out administrative and operational type of workers looking at occupations they direct determinants the degree to which the occupation is important or the day's work is important you know varied between the companies and that's exactly what you want to know so that the companies can do something about it the fact that which makes the generalization to the sector more difficult but I think that that's kind of the whole idea is that we're trying to see what each company can do and they're all different so I think that's the first thing the other which I thought was quite interesting is that the higher pay does not necessarily mean lower gender pay gap in this case it was exactly the opposite the higher pay more actually had a bigger gap and so it's not the two don't necessarily go together and again it's an indication how important the different companies are and the last thing just to say that I think that when we come to the recommendations and I think they were very interesting very informative that's where what it is is that it's two intelligent researchers have come up with from talking to people from two companies what looks like generalizable best practices but it isn't like they've done hundreds of firms and there's all this stuff in generalize so I think the study results are exactly what we would have hoped that we can tell the difference between companies of this and that based on some interviews qualitative and knowledgeable people you can come up with what looks like recommendations but I think you have to be careful that those recommendations are just what they're saying they're based on relatively small sets of discussions but so the bottom line is great job and I think it's going in a direction that we were hoping to go in terms of methodology and people shouldn't take away more from what we're doing than what we ever intended great thank you very much Richard and Martha so yes I mean to conclude from the World Banana Forum Secretary Dan we just wanted to thank all the organizations involved so a special thanks to Sally and Louisa as well for the very detailed overview of the study and the results I think it was really insightful for most of the participants and we're happy to see that there were some questions and also reflections from the participants also in the session today of course to the anchor research institute to Richard and Martha anchor Fairtrade Germany and CLAC as well for supporting in the process with the World Banana Forum through the letter of agreement we had we would also like to think of course all of the participants that I still see we have many here participating so thank you for staying the the extra time and we really hope that you found the study the methodology and also the results insightful and of course please feel free to let us know if there's any additional questions we're also happy to forward those to the anchors to Sally and Louisa and finally just to conclude a very big thanks also to members of the World Banana Forum Secretariat who have been providing support with interpretation throughout this whole session so a special thanks to David and Mattia for their support today again yes we would like to just express our thanks for all of the hard work that has been going on for this for the study and we look forward to seeing how this will progress in terms of also the recommendations and also to see future studies in this area of work so thank you again to everyone and we wish you all a nice rest of the day or a nice evening