Gender Mainstreaming

The goal of our Gender Mainstreaming portfolio is to support funders and implementing partners to substantively increase their resourcing for internal policies and culture that advance gender equality, as well as external gender transformative programming leading to amplified impact in development sectors and advancing a more just world. To do this, we work with organizations to build ownership and capacity at every level for thoughtful and effective gender integration throughout their work. 

We have a core team of staff and consultants with diverse expertise across sectors and geographies. We work with values aligned partners to offer a suite of products, either as stand-alone offerings or as comprehensive programs. Some examples of these offerings are:  

  • Grow leadership ambition for and commitments to gender equality with accompanying accountability mechanisms.  

  • Build strategies that center gender equality informed by intersectional feminist analysis incorporating tactics and goals to address gender gaps and barriers and advance gender equality for amplified impact. 

  • Assess gender in programmatic portfolios to understand opportunities and potential challenges in deepening a gender focus in programmatic work, and to make specific strategic recommendations.  

  • Strengthen organizational policies and practices on gender equality aimed at understanding the role that organizational culture, policy and practices may be playing in perpetuating unjust gender dynamics, and at setting a path to build an enabling organizational environment for people of all gender to thrive.  

  • Strengthen programmatic action that is intentionally designed to address root causes of gender injustice to advance sector and gender justice goals, with appropriate resources and capacity for gender-related work and including robust measurement for accountability and learning. 

  • Forge new connections and collaborate with diverse individuals and partners, building bridges across fields and sectors while challenging entrenched power structures, including by prioritizing the perspectives, inputs, and leadership of those most adversely affected by inequality and injustice. 

  • Shift mindsets and culture to recognize the harmful effects of entrenched gender inequality and injustice and the amplified impact that can be unlocked through integrating a focus on gender equality in strategies, programs, and practices. 

 

We do this by providing end to end solutions for our partners that are both tailored to their specific sectoral goals and aim to move them to greater action to advance gender justice. To achieve this two-pronged goal, we: 

  • Listen proactively to our partners’ needs: We get to know the unique needs and challenges a partner faces, and bring feminist analysis to the problem they are trying to solve for.  

  • Bring together comprehensive expertise:  We leverage our unique operating model to build a team of staff and consultants with deep and diverse sector and geographic expertise, and new perspectives and approaches on what, and who, constitutes ‘expertise’. 

  • Tap into established and emerging sources of evidence and knowledge: We bring together the best available data and evidence, and recognizing that standard approaches to data generation systematically miss perspectives of those most affected by inequality and injustice, we also look for alternative sources of information to complete our analysis. 

  • Learn from intersectional feminist movements, practitioners, and other fields/disciplines working to advance gender justice to continually adapt our approaches and bring insights from movements to our projects. 

  • Build solutions: We build highly tailored, actionable approaches to meet partners where they are while expanding their vision of what is possible. We translate data and evidence of what works into actionable recommendations that are relevant and resonate in specific contexts of diverse sectors. 

  • Advise on their implementation: We leverage our deep practitioner expertise to advise on the deployment of custom-built solutions, anticipating potential challenges, and helping to course correct along the way.   

  • Learn and adapt: We work with our partners to measure progress, learn from their experience, and adapt our and their approaches to gender mainstreaming.

Spotlight on our Gender Mainstreaming Work

  • Reducing Gender Bias in Household Consumption Data: Implications for Food Fortification Policy

  • Design, Analyze, Communicate (DAC): Integrating Sex-Gender for Informative Clinical Trials