Gender-Sensitive Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning
Counting women is not measuring gender
Most programmes that report on gender report a headcount: how many of the people we reached were women. That is an attendance register, not a finding. This flagship is the measurement that has to follow — indicators that can detect a change in who decides rather than who attends, empowerment measured the way Kabeer defined it rather than as a decision-making tick-box, unpaid care read off India’s own Time Use Survey with its denominators intact, violence measured under protocols that put the respondent ahead of the dataset, intersectional analysis honest about what 1,200 households can and cannot support, and feminist evaluation as a practice rather than a paragraph in a proposal.
Measurement-First
Indian Data
Interactive Lexicon
Why a Whole Flagship on Gender in MEL?
Because the two halves are taught apart and practised together. A gender course gives you Moser, Kabeer, intersectionality and the politics of knowledge, and stops before the indicator table. A MEL course gives you results chains, sampling and evaluation design, and treats sex as a disaggregation variable to be added at the end. What falls between them is most of the actual work: deciding what a change in gender relations would look like in data, building an instrument that could detect it, collecting it without harming the person who answers, and reporting a finding that a steering committee would rather not receive.
Where this sits. Gender Studies: Feminisms, Power & Social Change is the theory this course assumes, and MEL for Development is the machinery. Read either first if you need it; neither is a prerequisite. On the 101 side, Gender Mainstreaming 101 and MEL Basics 101 cover the vocabulary in a hundred slides each. Alongside, Causal Inference for what an attribution claim can carry, Nothing About Us Without Us for disability and the same measurement problems from a different axis, and Prevention of Atrocities for caste as a data category rather than a footnote.
Denominators before conclusions
India’s Time Use Survey reports unpaid work per participant and per person, and the gender ratio it implies is 3.2 on one denominator and 5.9 on the other. Same survey, same year. Every module starts from what the number is a fraction of.
Indian sources you can open
NFHS-5, the Time Use Surveys of 2019 and 2024, PLFS, the Gender Budget Statement, NCRB. Every figure in this course is one a reader can pull for themselves, and the modules say which table it came from.
The measurements that can do harm
Three modules on questions that are dangerous to ask badly — violence, household decision-making, and caste alongside gender — where the ethical protocol and the statistical design are the same conversation.
“Evidence that women played a role in making decisions that were of little consequence—or were assigned to women in any case by virtue of their pre-existing roles and responsibilities—tells us far less about their power to choose than does evidence on decisions relating to their critical life choices or to choices they had been denied in the past.” — Naila Kabeer, The Conditions and Consequences of Choice, UNRISD Discussion Paper No. 108 (1999), p.18
Assess Yourself — Gender-Sensitive MEL
Six auto-graded questions on the core ideas of the course — what disaggregation does and does not show, what the frameworks measure, what a denominator changes, and what it is unsafe to measure carelessly. Pick an answer and check it; each explains the reasoning. Nothing is stored and there is no sign-in.
Papers & Resources
A short reading list, weighted towards things you can open today. The conceptual papers are the ones you will be argued with about; the Indian datasets are the ones you will be asked to quote. Everything below is free to read.
The conceptual spine
Naila Kabeer, The Conditions and Consequences of Choice (UNRISD Discussion Paper 108, 1999) — resources, agency, achievements, and a long section on why decision-making indicators mislead. Caroline Moser on practical and strategic gender needs (World Development 17:11, 1989). Sara Longwe’s empowerment framework. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989), open access — read the original before the summaries of it.
Measurement instruments
The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index and pro-WEAI, with their full questionnaires and computation code. The WHO ethical and safety recommendations for research on violence against women (2001) and the 2016 companion for intervention research. The ICATUS 2016 activity classification, which is what makes two time-use surveys comparable.
Indian data you will actually use
MoSPI microdata for the Time Use Surveys of 2019 and 2024 and for PLFS. NFHS-5 for the domestic violence and women’s empowerment modules, with the DHS state and district factsheets. NCRB for recorded crime, read with its own caveats. The Union Budget’s Gender Budget Statement (Statement 13), and UDISE+ for schooling.
Sibling courses
Theory in Gender Studies; the general system in MEL for Development. Then Causal Inference for what an attribution claim can carry, Nothing About Us Without Us for the same measurement problems on the disability axis, Prevention of Atrocities for caste as a data category, and Livelihoods in India for the work questions behind Modules 7 and 12.
Practice the Material & Continue Learning
Every flagship course sits inside a wider open-source learning network. The cards below cross-link this course with hands-on Studios, an AI study companion, the foundational 101 decks, reading companions, printable handouts, live dojos and the premium tools.
Five Studios do the work this course asks for:
- Gender Studies Studio — the frameworks in Module 2
- Theory of Change Studio — Module 4, including the harm pathway
- LogFrame Builder — the capstone indicator set
- Survey Design Studio — Modules 6 and 9
- Disability-Inclusive MEL Studio — the same questions on another axis
An AI Study Companion for this course is not live yet — when it is, you will be able to question the material, get topic summaries and generate study aids at your own pace. In the meantime the Gender & MEL Lexicon covers the vocabulary.
- AI Companion · not yet available
Free 100-slide foundational primers that pair well with this flagship:
Interactive reading companions across the ImpactMojo library that deepen this flagship — feminist theory, the economics of the household, and evaluation method.
Print-optimised handouts across ten tracks — methods, ethics, frameworks, lexicons, quick-reference cards. The Gender and MEL tracks are the ones to start with.
Weekly dojo sessions in the South Asian dev-practitioner cohort — case clinics, paper discussions, live Q&A.
Premium tools plus 1:1 coaching, cohort access, and certificates. Sliding-scale pricing.