Is your workplace gender equality initiative actually effective?

Key findings

We’ve created a tool to help program designers and coordinators assess if their initiatives are actually working to advance gender equality – The GIWL Women’s Leadership Program (WLP) Evaluation Framework. The Framework assesses program impacts at the individual, organisational and structural level. We know that to make meaningful progress on gender equality, it’s not about “fixing” individual women to make them “more confident” leaders, but rather about addressing systemic issues at every level. So we made sure that the Framework evaluates the effectives of programs in addressing barriers to equality at every level – structural, organisational, and individual – to ensure that programs are achieving meaningful change and not just virtue signalling. The Framework takes an evidence-based approach, using the research on what works to advance equality.

Through our research, we found that various factors at each level challenge women’s advancement towards leadership positions. At an individual level, factors such as caring responsibilities, self-efficacy beliefs and confidence each affect women’s choice to apply for leadership roles. Organisational challenges often relate to masculine work culture, gendered workplace norms and exclusionary networks which may be critical for advancement into leadership positions. Structurally, these are things like stereotypes and pervasive gender biases in leadership positions. Factors from different levels are also interconnected, for example masculine leadership norms and stereotypes that associate leaders with men may bias the recruitment process in favour of men, leading to an overrepresentation of men in leadership and discouraging other women from applying for those positions.

To break these entrenched barriers, any WLP developed should aim to make impacts on individuals, organisations, and structural gender equality. The Evaluation Framework developed by GIWL ANU aims to measure the impact of WLPs over these three critical levels.

1. At an individual level, we advise assessing program experience (e.g. satisfaction with program, willingness to refer it to others), knowledge and skills, behavioural intentions (e.g. do participants seek opportunities crucial to their development as leaders), networks (e.g. women often have more limited leadership social connections compared to men), credibility (e.g. whether participation enhances perceived credibility as a leader), personal transformation and psychological outcomes (e.g. perseverance), career progression (e.g. did the program result in promotion application/success, salary improvements, more direct reports, etc.). 
2. At an organisational level, we advise looking for changes in organisational structure and policies (e.g. recruitment, training, promotion, pay, performance evaluation, leave conditions, termination), organisational performance (e.g. profitability, growth, stock market performance), and workplace experiences (e.g. gender bias, discrimination, sense of cultural safety). 
3. At a structural level, we advise looking for changes in terms of structural equality (e.g. proportion of women in formal leadership positions, across different portfolios and types of work, etc.) and social equality (e.g. women’s experiences in leadership and how they are perceived in leadership at a broad level). We also advise evaluating the overall project (for instance, in terms of success/completion rates and whether the program has a theory of change that links the initiative to overarching program goals, and outlines a path to get there).

We also advise considering the following three aspects that contribute to rigorous evaluation: 

1. A theory of change (ToC): A ToC allows organisations to get to the root cause of the issue they are aiming to address and map how their chosen policy program (like WLP) aims to influence or change that root cause. Once a WLP’s key components have been identified and its theorised causal pathways mapped and articulated, decisions can be made about which components and pathways of the program are of most interest to evaluate. 
2. A timeline for evaluation: If impact is assessed almost immediately or too late after the finalisation of the program, stakeholders may not link the achieved effects to the program itself. Moreover, longitudinal analysis may be needed to understand any medium to long-term impacts.
3.  Causality: To establish causality, it is firstly important to establish baseline data – the conditions or status of individuals, organisations and structures pre- intervention. In a best-case scenario, WLPs could also incorporate a control condition, with randomly assigned participants, (that is, a group of similar participants who do not receive the leadership training) to establish that any positive changes among participants in the leadership program were not found among participants in the control condition and were thus due to the leadership program specifically.