Methodological Principles

GEPPERS agreed on the following principles from the beginning for pursuing meaningful and accurate research on whether gender equality policies achieved success. They were based on our past experience with studying the highly complex process of gender equality policy in action and also what many of us saw about the short comings of the existing international gender equality indexes, produced by international organizations like the United Nations, the European Institute of Gender and the World Economic Forum (Liebowitz and Zwingel 2014).  Feminist policy researchers saw these measurements as being overly general and even not accurate and thus not good indicators of actual policy success withing a given policy area in a given country.  This information researchers agreed could only be collected by country specific experts at the “street-level” where policy implementation actually played out through process-tracing where the actors and their actions were followed from the time a discrete policy was applied. At the same time, this individual micro and detailed focus on the weeds of the policy process needed to be done with a common framework and measures that would allow for accurate comparison. 

A central hypothesis we were interested in came out of previous comparative gender and policy research (Mazur and Engeli 2023) and the belief that gender equality policy could actuality make democracies more democratic by empowering women who had been excluded from the policy process through descriptive representation as well as the demands they had about policy through substantive representation.  Thus, policy implementation was a terrain for representation and democracy and research suggested that if women were empowered in this process then gender equality policies would be more successful.(Kriszan and Lombardo 2013)   In addition, we agreed with previous research on intersectionality that argued that women were not one monolithic group, but were cross-cut by different vectors of  inequality —  gender, sexual identity and orientation, race, ethnicity, age, disability (Mügge et al 2018).  As a result, the question about whether women were empowered or whether policies actually improved gender equality had to be analyzed in terms of the full intersectionality of women’s identities in all contexts. A final decision that was made in the design of the GEPP Approach was also based on previous comparative gender and policy analysis which showed that patterns of gender equality policy success did not necessarily happen among groups of countries but across different sector of gender equality policy that were similar across countries. This is why we have sought to recruit country experts to do the country cases of policy implementation.

The Common Analytical Framework for the GEPP Approach

The GEPP approach was first formally presented in a 2018 article published in the European Journal of Gender and Politics  by  the co conveners and has been applied in three different comparative studies of gender equality policy in action —  corporate board gender equality, equal pay and in 6 different policy areas in France .  Here, you can download the specific guidelines that have been given to GEPPERs for data collection and analysis of their specific policy implementation cases.

instructions-for-gepp-equal-pay-chapters-

The figure below presents the common framework that guides the “process-tracing (George and Bennett 2005)” research by policy experts at the street-level within countries, as well as the comparative analysis of all of the cases across countries and sectors to reflect the specific national context of the implementation of policy while still assuring that the level of success could be compared across countries.

Source: Engeli and Mazur (2018)

The model maps out the four analytical components of the post adoption process: outputs, practice, outcomes and context. It traces the process of policies in general terms- what happens before a formal decision is made: pre-adoption – agenda-setting , problem definition, and proposal generation, post adoption including the instruments or outputs formally establish to implement and evaluate the policy, the actual use of those instruments by policy actors in practice  and then the results or outcomes of those policy efforts. The framework  provides a guide for researchers to trace the unfolding of a given policy over time as it moves through the necessarily messy and seldom stepwise process of policy formation in democracies.

Contextual determinants can be at the sub-national, national or extra-national levels depending on the dynamics of the policy.  The politics and outcome of the pre-adoption and adoption processes, in particular the actual content of the policy, can also be potential determinants of both policy post adoption and outcomes. In many cases the specific mix of the policy instruments comes directly from the content of the formal policy. At the same time, pre-adoption, adoption and post-adoption take place over time – indicated by  T;  T+ 1: T+2. Thus, the content of policies, the mix of instruments and even the goals of policy can be changed in the post-adoption stages and the assessment of level of gender transformation in outcomes is determined by examining the state of affairs prior to the adoption of the policy to a certain number of years after the given policy was implemented and evaluated. 

The democratizing potential of policy implementation is addressed in the practice of the post-adoption phase through the inclusive policy empowerment component. In telling the story of if and how the policy instruments are used by policy actors, GEPP researchers need to identify who came forward to speak for women’s interests, in their full intersectional complexity, in the post adoption process: what did they say, for which groups of women were they speaking – descriptive representation — and were their demands actually incorporated in the practice of policy – the substantive element of representation.  The hypothesis here is that if there are higher levels of inclusive policy empowerment it should in some ways contribute to policy success.  Thus, researchers have to determine whether their low to high levels of inclusive policy empowerment in their cases.

The third component of the model is a summary measure of outcomes. Researchers collect information for this summary measure by answering three questions in their policy implementation case analyses.

1. was the problem identified by the original policy solved?
2. were the frames about gender roles used by the major implementation and evaluation actors changed the practice of policy adoption to better incorporate gender equality?
3.  did general public attitudes about gender equality on the specific issue of the policy change following the implementation of the policy?

From this information, researchers then identify which level of gender transformation  was achieved in the final outcome of their policy case: gender-neutral, gender rowback, gender accommodation and simple or complex gender transformation.  Once the policy case analysis is completed the researcher needs to assess what were the most important factors in determining the outcome they identified: pre adoption politics, the mix of policy instruments, inclusive policy empowerment, gender biases in the system, etc. 

For each of the three studies that used this framework – a separate comparative analysis of the dynamics and determinants of successful gender equality policy from the case analyses in that sector or country was conducted.   While the number of cases in each published study ranged from 6 to 14 and so a more textual and qualitative analysis was conducted, the hypotheses that were generated from these comparative analyses were intended to feed into a more quantitative study of all of the cases together, which at this point of GEPP is around 60 cases. Thus, the GEPP project is grounded also in multi methods approaches and research.

All works cited here can be found on the GEPP publications page.