Interactive resources for incubators and accelerators
Interactive resources for incubators and accelerators
Interactive resources for incubators and accelerators

GLIA Toolkit...

Getting Started

Measuring how your work is contributing towards advancing gender equality is important. It can allow you to make more inclusive, accessible and equitable decisions, as well as equip you with the information needed to share your impact more broadly.

Getting Started

If you’re serious about making real and meaningful change through applying a gender lens to your work, then you must have a reliable and data-driven method to keep track of the impact that the strategies you have chosen are having. Whilst it won’t be possible to measure everything, you can start small by measuring one or two variables, and build up from there. Doing so will allow you to make informed decisions to invest more in the strategies that work, and less in those that don’t, and will enable you to share your progress in advancing gender equality with your team, your funders and the broader ecosystem.

Reflection

How can you know if your gender strategies are having the impact you want them to?

Are any of your strategies having unintended consequences?

Build a Business Case

Why is measuring gender in your organisation, programs and ecosystem important? How will this data benefit the business, your programs or advance gender equality across the ecosystem? How will it help your teams make informed decisions on policies, procedures, program design or new products and services?

Communicating the value this process will offer to your organisation is an important initial step to ensure the team is invested in the success of these efforts. There is now plenty of data around the benefits of gender equality particularly within a business context. Some examples include:

  • Gender-diversity in executive teams is correlated with greater profitability and value creation (McKinsey, 2018)
  • Companies with more women are more likely to introduce radical new innovations into the market (Díaz-García et al., 2013)
  • Higher percentages of women in leadership positions lead to higher levels of performance (Calvert Impact Capital., 2018)
  • Greater diversity positively leads to better decision-making (Rock and Grant, 2016)

  • Organisation

    Additionally, measuring how your board, team and culture are advancing gender equality can, for example, help you ensure everyone’s voice is heard, all staff have equal opportunities to thrive and grow within the organisation, and everyone feels a sense of belonging.

  • Program

    Apart from the greater profitability, improved performance, and increased innovation your ventures will likely experience from improvements in gender equality, your programs may also benefit from an increase in funding. With the proven benefits of applying a gender lens, your programs and projects may become more attractive to funders. 

  • Ecosystem

    You may want to highlight the growing movement to apply a gender lens across the social enterprise ecosystem and the opportunity this presents your organisation to take a leadership role in sharing learnings, producing public resources, or inspiring other programs that apply a gender lens.

Consider your capacity

Who will be in charge of monitoring, evaluating and learning from the gender strategies you put in place? Do you have a dedicated monitoring and evaluation employee? Or a gender or diversity officer? If not, who will take on the responsibility and how much of their time will it require?

  • Organisation

    At the organisational level, if you do not have a dedicated M&E employee, you may want to consider creating a working group to lead your efforts to track advancement towards gender equality within your organisation. For smaller teams, the responsibility may sit with you or your management team. 

  • Program

    At the program level, your program managers may take on the responsibility of collecting and analysing the gender data you collect alongside other program reporting or impact data they collect. 

  • Ecosystem

    Measuring your impact on the ecosystem, for example, the number of public resources you produce, conferences you speak at, or any advocacy work you do to improve gender equality, will likely require less from you than your organisational and program measurement and depending on the size of your team, may be led either by your program teams, a working group or your management team.

Next:

Choosing Gender Indicators