ABSTRACT
This chapter synthesizes and analyzes existing research on women's employment in renewable energy (RE) in industrialized, emerging and developing economies. It highlights similarities and differences in occupational patterns in women's employment in renewables in different parts of the world and makes recommendations for optimizing women's participation in the sector. A combination of women's self-perception as well as societal perceptions of women's incompetence in technical occupations has been identified quite frequently in the literature as an impediment to women's optimal participation. The issues of self- and societal perceptions may be less of a constraint when women own enterprises or are otherwise self-employed. Skill shortages have been reported in RE in all OECD countries. Women's underrepresentation in RE is often an outcome of the low numbers of women who graduate as engineers in industrialized countries. The importance of public sector involvement in creating a policy framework to enable the sustainable development and dissemination of renewables has been made in OECD countries.
