My “home-made” evaluation tools to avoid gender (and equity) blindness by Sara Vaca

In this AEA365 'Rad Resource' blog post, Sara Vaca discusses the importance and challenges of introducing a Gender perspective into evaluations - even when this is not included in the evaluation ToRs.

Sara outlines the tool she uses for Gender Analysis, and presents an infographic summarising some of the tools included in the recent UN Women’s manual: Inclusive Systemic Evaluation for Gender equality, Environments and Marginalized voices (ISE4GEMs): A new approach for the SDG era.

This resource and the following information was contributed by Alice Macfarlan.

Authors and their affiliation

Sara Vaca (evaluation consultant)

Key features

Summaries of number of tools for doing gender analysis are presented in infographic form. These are primarily drawn from the UN Women’s manual: Inclusive Systemic Evaluation for Gender equality, Environments and Marginalized voices (ISE4GEMs): A new approach for the SDG era.

Tools include:

• Harvard Analytical (Gender Roles) Framework)
• Gender Planning Framework
• Gender Analysis Frameworks
• Women's Empowerment Framework
• The Institute of Development Studies Social Relations Framework
• City-level climate change assessment for mainstreaming gender
• Gender at Work Framework
• The Toolkit on Gender Equality Results and Indicators

How have you used or intend on using this resource?

To get a quick overview of some tools that can be used for gender analysis. It's useful as a short companion read to the UN Women's manual (linked above).

Why would you recommend it to other people?

I think Sara's piece is useful for gaining a quick overview of some possible tools for gender analysis, which are made more useful by her comments on how she has used these tools and what they are particularly useful (or not useful) for. I also agree with Sara's message about the importance of trying to get evaluation commissioners to engage with issues of gender equity in evaluations, and appreciate that she doesn't offer all the answers on how to do this well. 

I'd recommend that people read through the UN Women's ISE4GEMs manual, which also goes into more detail around issues that should be addressed in Gender Analysis, such as intersectionality. Another good companion resource that discusses this is BetterEvaluation's Gender Analysis theme page.