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Parties requested the UN secretariat to prepare a technical paper on guidelines or other tools for integrating gender considerations into climate change related activities under the Convention (decision 18/CP.20). The technical paper provides an overview of existing methodologies and tools that are available to assist Parties and others to incorporate gender considerations when formulating and implementing strategies for mitigating and adapting to climate change.

The ~ 100 resources identified during the desk review for the technical paper are listed below. Resources marked with an asterisk (*) are the documents referred to in the technical paper as the “selected tools and guidelines”.

This resource page may be updated to include additional relevant resources that are identified by, or provided to the secretariat after publication of the technical paper. If you would like to provide information to the secretariat on relevant resources, please contact us at: Gender Team

The purpose of the tool kit is to assist staff and consultants of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in conceptualizing and designing gender-responsive projects in the energy sector. ADB’s Policy on Gender and Development mandates its investments in all sectors to promote gender mainstreaming.

It guides users in designing project outputs, activities, inputs, indicators, and targets to respond to gender issues in energy sector operations. ADB staff can use the tool kit in identifying social and gender issues to be documented in the initial poverty and social analysis during the concept phase. Consultants can use it in carrying out more detailed social and gender analysis during the project preparatory technical assistance or detailed design or due diligence phase. It should be noted that the tool kit is not meant to be prescriptive; rather, it offers a menu of entry points that the project team can choose from.

The tool kit has been broken down into key subsectors of ADB’s energy sector investments— namely, transmission and distribution, rural electrification, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. While not all aspects of the tool kit are relevant to all projects, this approach will assist staff and consultants to select the subsectors most relevant to the specific project context. Enabling policy and capacity development has been addressed as a crosscutting consideration applied to all subsectors.

ADB projects categorized with “gender mainstreaming” require a gender action plan (GAP) and gender targets and indicators in the project design and monitoring framework. The tool kit provides tips to designing the GAP and gender targets and indicators relevant to the specific subsector context. It also includes guidelines for preparing terms of reference for consultants to conduct a detailed gender analysis and to prepare GAPs.

Case studies from ADB’s project portfolio have been included to illustrate good practices in mainstreaming gender in energy sector projects. A selection of useful references is listed at the end. 

A. Who Is the Tool Kit For?

This tool kit aims to assist development practitioners to ensure that gender perspectives are incorporated into development initiatives, and to monitor and evaluate gender equality results. It presents a menu of gender equality outcomes, results, and indicators that may be selected or adapted by users.

While the tool kit focuses primarily on the sectors and strategic priorities of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Australia’s aid program, it is designed for a wider audience of development policy makers, planners, implementers, and evaluators. The tool kit will assist specialists in particular sectors to identify gender equality results and indicators; it may also be used by gender specialists who work across a range of sectors.

B. When Can the Tool Kit Be Used?

The tool kit is intended to be read selectively according to the sector and type of development initiative. It is not expected that every result or indicator will be relevant for all policies, strategies, programs, or projects; the selection of results and indicators will be determined by the level of the intervention, its scale, and the development cooperation modality. The tool kit may be used at any point in the policy, strategy, program, or project cycle. However, it is preferable for gender equality and women’s empowerment indicators to be identified during planning and design.

To ensure progress is made on gender equality, results and indicators need to be incorporated when

1. (i)  developing country and regional strategies and performance frameworks;

2. (ii)  designing programs, projects, or other initiatives and their monitoring and evaluation frameworks; and

(iii)  implementing, monitoring, reviewing, and evaluating policies, programs, projects, and other development initiatives. 

Identifying the gender equality results that any development initiative aims to achieve—along with the concrete actions needed to achieve these results, and the indicators needed to measure progress—are essential steps for reducing poverty, advancing gender equality, and empowering women.

Gender equality and women’s empowerment need to be pursued in their own right for a just and equal society, and have been acknowledged as important objectives for many decades, including in the Millennium Development Goals. Moreover, there is considerable evidence and broad international agreement that advancing gender equality helps reduce poverty, supports inclusive growth and other broad development outcomes, and enhances the effectiveness and sustainability of development initiatives.

Despite long-standing international commitments and the demonstrated benefits of addressing gender inequalities, incorporating gender perspectives into development work remains a significant challenge. One of the most important lessons is that actions to address gender inequalities must be explicit throughout development planning and programming if consistent progress is to be made toward gender equality. Without explicit objectives, strategies, targets, and actions to ensure women’s equal participation and outcomes, the needs of women and girls continue to be overlooked. Identifying clear indicators to measure gender equality results is essential to measure and improve performance.

The following criteria are features of a good indicator.

• Valid: measuring what the indicator is intended to measure.

• Specific: measuring only the particular aspect of the initiative it is intended to measure.

• Reliable: minimizing random error; and producing the same result consistently, given the same set of circumstances, including the same observer or respondent.

• Comparable: enabling comparisons of results or effectiveness over time, and in different contexts.

• Nondirectional: enabling a measurement of change in any direction.

• Precise: using clear, well-specified definitions.

• Feasible: able to be measured using available tools, methods, resources, and skills.

• Relevant: clearly linked to an input, output, or outcome of the policy, strategy, program, project, or initiative being measured.

• Verifiable: able to be proven or tested empirically. 

The barriers for women in higher education not only raise questions of basic fairness, but place serious limitations on the success of educational institutions themselves. Colleges and universities are not taking advantage of the widest talent pool when they discriminate on the basis of gender in hiring or promoting faculty. When women are hired, they are often paid lower salaries than men of equal rank, again shortchanging both women faculty and educational institutions by discouraging women graduate students from pursuing academic careers. The nature and scope of academic research is, in turn, affected by the lack of gender equity. When women are missing from faculty ranks, the research questions they would raise—whether or not those questions relate to matters of gender—are not asked and the corresponding research is not undertaken. American higher education as a whole suffers because of the lack of gender equity in the faculty. 

The extraordinary expansion of women’s enrollment in graduate programs has not translated greater  women’s presence on university and college faculties. Women’s integration into the faculty ranks, however, has occurred much more slowly. In 1972, women made up 27 percent of all faculty in higher education. By 2003, women comprised 43 percent of all faculty, 39 percent of full-time and 48 percent of part-time faculty. Women occupied about 9 percent of full professor positions at four-year colleges and universities in 1972, and still only 24 percent of all full professors in 2003.

The AAUP has been tracking this uneven progress of women in the academy for many years and reports faculty data by gender as part of its annual compensation survey. Due to the persistence of faculty gender inequity at U.S. colleges and universities, it is time to look more deeply into the situation women face on individual campuses and among different types of institutions. Reviewing comparative data across a large number of higher education institutions, it becomes more obvious that women’s status varies greatly. Accordingly, AAUP has developed a new set of numbers, gender equity indicators, for individual colleges and universities to illustrate women’s progress (or lack thereof) in pursuing academic careers. The four indicators represent different aspects of the overall status of women faculty, which at current levels amount to a series of accumulated disadvantages: Women faculty are less likely than men to hold full-time positions. Women in those full-time positions are underrepresented in tenure-track positions, and have not attained senior faculty rank (represented here by the full professor rank) at the same rates as men. At each full-time faculty rank, women earn less than men, and the accumulated disadvantages of position are exemplified by the comparison of overall average salary in the final indicator.