Handbook: How to Manage Gender-Responsive Evaluation (2022)

UN Women

Handbook: How to Manage Gender-Responsive Evaluation (2022)

Gender-responsive evaluation is a priority area for UN Women and serves three key purposes:

To demonstrate accountability to stakeholders;

To provide credible and reliable evidence for decision-making; and

To contribute important lessons learned about normative, operational, and coordination work.

With the aim of continuing to strengthen and support the evaluation function, the UN Women Independent Evaluation Service (IES) has developed an updated version of the “UN Women Evaluation Handbook: How to manage gender-responsive evaluation”. The primary audience for the handbook remains UN Women personnel who are involved with and manage evaluations.

The handbook follows the evaluation process through planning, preparation, conduct, reporting, evaluation, use, and follow-up. For each stage, the handbook has been updated to align with the current UN Women evaluation policy and coverage norms, as well as IES structure, governance, and processes.

In addition to providing up-to-date links to all guidance documents and references (including the 2020 United Nations Evaluation Group ethical guidance for evaluations, disability inclusion, and IES data management for evaluations).

The handbook includes references to a rich set of new IES knowledge products, including:

“Good practices in gender-responsive evaluation”

“UN Women rapid assessment tool to evaluate gender equality and women’s empowerment results in humanitarian contexts”;

“Inclusive systemic evaluation for gender equality, environments, and marginalized voices (ISE4GEMs)”;

“UN Women guidance note: Evaluating impact in gender equality and women’s empowerment”; and

“Pocket tool for managing evaluation during the COVID-19 pandemic”.

Evaluation can help us achieve greater gender equality in a new development agenda. Here’s how.

We’ve done this before, setting global development targets with the Millennium Development Goals. But the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are different. This time, they took shape through a participatory process, committing both developed and developing countries alike. The SDGs also adopted a robust follow-up and review framework based on country-led evaluations, and most importantly, they pledge that no one is left behind.

Human rights, social justice and gender equality approaches are at the forefront of the Global Evaluation Agenda. Evaluation, and in particular gender-responsive evaluation, has a critical role to play in ensuring the inclusion of those traditionally marginalized and discriminated against.

In this vein, the UN Women Independent Evaluation Office is working to strengthen gender-responsive evaluation within the UN System and at the national level.

How can YOU get involved? Become an advocate for gender-responsive evaluation in your organization. Read Transform, a one-of-a-kind magazine on gender-responsive evaluations. Join the discussion online with EvalGender+ and its community of practice, and follow us on Twitter at @unwomenEval or Click Here to find an evaluation.

The SDGs present a great challenge to the evaluation community, but also a unique opportunity to make gender equality a reality.

The handbook also reflects recommendations on how to improve evaluations from recent IES Global Evaluation Reports Assessment and Analysis System reports.

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Publication (PDF, 1.36MB)

Bibliographic Information

Subject areas: 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Human Rights Monitoring and Evaluation