Gender transformative evaluation #1
What do people mean by gender transformative evaluation? Review #1
Gender transformative evaluation has become a bit of a buzz word. But for people like me, who work in the gender education space, it is clear that there is a lot of confusion about what gender transformative evaluation truly means. Therefore, I wanted to start a series of blog posts in which I review and providing my (brief) thoughts on different documents, including reports and peer reviewed articles, that refer to the concept of gender transformative evaluation. The idea is to expand and refine the conversation about ideas that are applied in widely divergent ways.
In this first entry, I will review the notions presented by Julia Espinosa back in 2013[1]. This was one of the first articles that I read in relation to the topic of gender transformative evaluations. The article describes ideas about gender sensitive evaluation practices in the field of international development. The aim of the article is to increase the knowledge about and the adoption of gender sensitive forms of evaluation. The author begins by providing a description of women focused evaluations, which spread in the early 90s as a response to the need of addressing gender inequalities in the international development field. Women focused evaluations examine the situation of women before, during and after an intervention, to ensure the integration of women into the development process[2]. As the name suggests, this type of evaluations focus on women. The author compares this approach to what they denominate gender sensitive evaluation, which appeared later in the 90s and focuses on structural inequalities between men and women. Gender sensitive evaluation also explores the differential implications for women and men of development activities, ultimately providing insight into progress towards reducing gender inequality and the empowerment of participants. In their own words, gender sensitive evaluation requires mainstreaming gender into the whole evaluation process. The author adds that gender sensitive evaluation requires expanding the scope of outcomes of interest and provides some examples of questions to consider in the design of an evaluation. In line with feminist approaches, the author explains that gender sensitive approaches require the adoption of mixed and participatory methodologies throughout the entire evaluation process, including the dissemination of results back to the stakeholders. They conclude by sharing some insight into the barriers to gender sensitive approaches: a lack of political will, conflation of gender and women, and missed opportunities at the earlier stages of a project.
From my take, I appreciate the author’s historical contextualization of women focused and gender sensitive evaluations. I believe this was the first article that introduced me to the concepts of Women in Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD), which happen to be very important to understand the evolution of gender transformative evaluation practices in the international development field. It is important to understand how these ideas appeared in the field and how they shaped the way in which we think about women and about gender in our evaluative practice. I also like the several warnings that the author provides with regards to the risks of believing that one is conducting gender sensitive work, while only examining superficial aspects of gender relations. This is something that we see in practice again and again, especially with the predominance of quantitative-only approaches. I do like the examples and ideas around how to enact gender sensitive methods in evaluation, although I would have liked to see a lot more on the issue of gender sensitive indicators. Last, I appreciate the distinction between women and gender as analytical categories, something that appears frequently in feminist critiques.
On the critical side, the ideas provided feel a bit too general. For example, one area that I struggle with in my work is providing information back to stakeholders in a timely manner. In general, evaluation activities take a lot of time, and it is virtually impossible to complete a full evaluation cycle (e.g. baseline and endline) and report back to the participants on time. Therefore, more than simply stating that we need to report back to stakeholders, which I strongly agree with, I think the issue should be broken into specific ideas of when, how, to whom, with which level of depth and for what purpose should this information be provided. Similarly, I read a lot about the need to create gender sensitive indicators that focus on the relative status of different genders. However, little is said about the interpretation of these indicators, which is a very muddy space. For example, if the participation of women increases from 45% to 55% in each scenario, and that of the other genders decreases to 45%, is that considered better for gender equality or merely the same? Also, these types of indicators are easier to interpret when thinking about two categories and may be totally incompatible with more complex gender categories. And so on. I guess from my practitioner’s point of view, I would appreciate authors describing how to bring these ideas into practice, with a lot more detail.
For now, let’s agree that gender sensitive evaluation is not the same as disaggregating for gender or conducting a gender analysis as part of the initial design of a project.
[1] Espinosa (2013). Moving towards gender-sensitive evaluation? Practices and challenges in international-development evaluation. Evaluation 19 (2), 171-182. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1356389013485195
[2] Consistent with the Women in Development (WID) approaches.
