Evaluation of Gender Equality Actions: A Tool for Learning and Boosting Gender Structural Change

Gender equality policies and actions face different kinds of resistances and difficulties in their implementation and this affects to the final results and transformations generated. The promotion of gender structural change is not an easy task and the evaluation could play an important role to enhance learning and think collaboratively about strategies and ways of making organizations more gender-responsive. This paper explores the experience of evaluating the GENOVATE project, a European action-research project, where six Universities pursued to promote a more gender-sensitive organizational culture through the implementation of different Gender Equality Action Plans (GEAPs) since 2013 until 2016. The paper presents the evaluation model applied for evaluating this action-research project that merges a collaborative approach and feminist evaluative approach. In this regard, the main features of GENOVATE project are described as well as the elements adopted from collaborative and feminist approaches to evaluate it. After that, contributions and limitations of both approaches for evaluating this kind of public action, for getting on-going learning and integrating it in the implementation process are explored. Finally, the paper highlights the main lessons learned and resistances found in the evaluation process.