As donors have become increasingly interested in promoting women’s leadership, a growing range of measures and indicators have emerged to measure and evaluate these efforts. Despite growing interest, however, there has been little sustained analysis of the issues associated with measuring women’s leadership in the literature. Because of the lack of analysis in this area, this report is largely based on a small number of available evaluation studies and project documents of women’s development programmes. These examples come mainly from Asia, but also include examples from Jamaica, Northern Ireland, Morocco and Malawi.
Measuring and evaluating women’s leadership is difficult because individual leadership is not easily separated from its context or from its nature as a shared and political process; because efforts to promote leadership are highly varied in their methods and address a wide range of leaders; and because results can often be evaluated only indirectly.
Leadership Development Programmes (LDPs) have often been ambiguous about what is meant by ‘leadership’, with a very small proportion explicitly defining the term. The next section provides examples of measures designed to capture changes in women’s leadership both at the individual attribute level and based on a ‘shared process’ understanding of leadership.
Donor efforts to promote leadership in development are extremely varied in their aims, teaching methods and contents. As a result, women’s LDPs tend to address a particularly varied set of audiences, which include existing leaders, potential leaders, grass-roots leaders, or sector-specific leaders.
Women’s leadership programmes use a range of quantitative and qualitative measures to assess immediate outputs and outcomes as well as wider impacts. The examples identified in this report largely confirm Lyne de Ver and Kennedy’s (2011, p.34) finding that the majority of LDPs evaluate ‘only at the individual or organisational level’ and that few programmes examine the wider impact of these programmes on policy or institutions, although some exceptions (UNIFEM Afghanistan, UNDEF Jamaica, AusAID Indonesia) were found. One of the key criticisms of current donor efforts to support women’s leadership has been a tendency to focus on narrow progress at the level of national political leadership at the expense of broader changes in political systems, or women’s leadership at the grass-roots level (Iknow Politics 2008, Tadros 2011, Waring 2011). A number of authors also stress the importance of moving beyond nominal measures of women’s political empowerment (such as the number of women in parliament) towards a more in-depth and contextualised analysis of what women leaders do once they gain office (Iknow Politics 2008, Waring 2011).
