Fernanda Garcia Wins Global Award for Work on Gender Equality
The big picture: Fernanda Garcia, Ph.D., a professor at UTEP’s Woody L. Hunt College of Business, received the 2025 UNCTAD Impact Award from the Academy of International Business for research that tackles one of the hardest global challenges: gender equality.
Why it matters: The award recognizes research that changes how governments and multinational enterprises think and act. Garcia’s work dives into why progress on SDG 5 (Gender Equality) is so difficult and what we can do about it.
What the research says:
Garcia and co-author Lorraine Eden (Texas A&M University) looked at gender equality through two lenses:
- Wicked problems — messy, complex issues that don’t have easy answers.
- Evidence-based policymaking — using data and research to make smarter decisions.
They state that gender equality is one of those wicked problems. It’s not just a matter of passing laws or collecting statistics — politics, culture, and competing priorities all get in the way.
So, what do we do?
Their paper offers two big ideas:
- Governments should partner with businesses to make progress — neither can do it alone.
- Companies need better tools to figure out where they can have the most impact.
Enter the SDG Materiality Matrix:
This is a simple framework for companies. It asks:
- Do we have good data on this issue?
- Is this issue important to how our company works?
If the answer to both is yes, that’s where you act. The goal is to move from feel-good statements to focused effort.
What’s next: Garcia was honored at the 2025 AIB Annual Conference. Her work stands out because it has informed policy recommendations across international institutions including the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the World Bank. It has also informed theory, explained how to embed the Sustainable Development Goals into firms’ operations, provided insights to projects funded by other international institutions such as the CASPER Project on the European Union Gender Equality Plan and the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia, and obtained business press resonance as cited in Forbes.
