Taking Policy Success Seriously: The Gendering Equality Policy in Practice Approach

The goal of this paper is to introduce and illustrate an alternative approach to current international indicators of gender equality that tend to provide quantified snapshots of gender equality that allows for a systematic investigation of the causality between gender equality policy and gender equality outcomes. Our central contention will be that the key to exposing such a causal link lies in the analysis of post-adoption processes of gender equality policies over-time and across sectors implementation, evaluation, outcomes and impacts or policy in “practice”. We adopt a Gendering Equality Policy in Practice perspective, in order to systematically assess three requirements, or pillars, of successful implementation of gender equality: the appropriate design and practice of tools and instruments of policy action, empowerment of subjects, and transformation of gender roles. Such a longitudinal and dynamic perspective must be taken to determine whether government policy implementation and outputs actually improve gender equality in society over a significant period of time across the full range of sectors where gender equality is promoted. The paper will first address the relevance of focusing on the post-adoption phases in order to fully assess when, how and to what extent gender equality policies successfully achieve the promotion of gender equality. It then presents the Gender Equality Policy in Practice Approach and discusses how to assess policy success and failure in the post-adoption phases according to the three analytical pillars: tools and instruments, empowerment and transformation.