Gender mainstreaming
Gender and indicators: overview report
Methodological approach to measuring gender equality
Authors:
; Bridge, IDS
Publisher:
BRIDGE, 2007
This report examines conceptual and methodological approaches to gender and measurements of change with a focus on indicators, examining current debates and good practice from the grassroots to the international levels.
While measuring is often considered to be a technical exercise, the decision to measure progress towards gender equality is political, as gender is often seen as a marginalised issue. The process of deciding what aspects of gender equality to measure is also political, usually reflecting the priorities of decision-makers rather than those of the women and men intended to benefit from the policy or programme (the ‘beneficiaries’). The ideal methodology should be thus a combined approach which incorporates gender-sensitive participatory techniques to help ensure that the topics of investigation are relevant to, and ‘owned’, by the subjects of the research.
Many development agencies have adopted a gender mainstreaming approach and yet lack
procedures to monitor whether commitments at the policy level are reflected in the internal structure, procedures and culture of an organisation, and whether they are being implemented in programming practice.
International and regional gender goals and indices are useful because they allow for cross-national comparisons of gender equality, and they condense complex data into clear messages about achievements and gaps in gender equality. Limitations with international indices include the notoriously unreliable nature of national-level census data, and the ongoing challenge of agreeing which elements of gender equality to measure and how best to capture these elements within a limited set of indicators.
- a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods should be considered by all development organisations, from international agencies through to grassroots organisations, in order to crosscheck results and to generate a richer understanding of the data.
- the development of specific context-relevant gender-sensitive indicators – and the use of andreporting on those indicators – should be made obligatory within international development agencies, governments and grassroots organisations.
- in the context of the new aid modalities, donors and governments should establish ccountability systems which track compliance with commitments to gender equality.
- governments and gender ministries should support the capacity of national statistical offices toproduce gender-sensitive data
