Unlocking Pathways to Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality: The Good, The Bad, and the Sticky

In the gender literature, stickiness is a bad thing. Sticky gender norms and power

relations lock women into lives of subordination and isolation. In the innovation

literature, by contrast, stickiness is the holy grail*it’s the special quality of successful innovations that allow them to take hold and go to scale.1