Bringing Numbers Back In? Quantitative Methodologies for Gender Equality Plans Evaluation

Various generations of EU-funded projects aimed at supporting the design and implementation of increasingly comprehensive Gender Equality Plans (GEPs) by a growing range of research and innovation organizations (including universities, research institutions and research funding and evaluation bodies), have led to relevant innovations in the realm of policy, program and project monitoring and evaluation. Those innovations derive from distinct research realms and bodies of literature: gender mainstreaming and feminist neo-institutionalism, with their own evaluation tools such as gender impact assessments, and fine-grained attention to both institutional and agents’ logics of action; policy and program evaluation literatures, notably those works irrigated by theory of change, which encourages universities and other research bodies pursuing a gender equality and diversity agenda to design their impact pathway to change; social design theory and practice, with its emphasis on co-designing monitoring and evaluation instruments through stakeholders’ participation. Lately, as the promoted standard moved towards inclusive GEPs, intersectionality also inspired new indicators and other evaluation instruments to assess structural change. Starting from a brief assessment of the latest contributions to the field, this paper will discuss the potential for more quantitative-based methodologies, to strengthen available GEP evaluation frameworks. It will elaborate upon three successive EU-funded GEP projects led or evaluated by Sciences Po Paris: EGERA (FP7, 2013-2017), SUPERA (H2020, 2018-2021) and RESET (H2020, 2021-2024), focusing on evaluation experiments carried out with quantitative data. Highlighting the value of such experiments through Anne Boring’s groundbreaking work on gender biased professors’ evaluation by students and academic mobility choices initiated under EGERA (Boring 2017, 2021, 2024), we will account of the setting-up by RESET of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) for assessing the impact of gender equality interventions devoted to raising awareness on gender bias in academic careers. The paper will account of our methodological approach, using the board game WAGES (Workshop Activity for Gender Equity Simulation) and of the challenges encountered in setting-up the experiments, with view to stimulate a multidisciplinary discussion on the potential of quantitative-based evaluation methods to (actually) measure both attitudinal and organizational change.