UN Women Evaluation Handbook: How to manage gender-responsive evaluation (2022)

Gender-responsive evaluation is a priority area for UN Women and serves three key purposes:

1. To demonstrate accountability to stakeholders;
2. To provide credible and reliable evidence for decision-making; and
3. To contribute important lessons learned about normative, operational, and coordination work.

With the aim of continuing to strengthen and support the evaluation function, the UN Women Independent Evaluation Service (IES) has developed an updated version of the “UN Women Evaluation Handbook: How to manage gender-responsive evaluation”. The primary audience for the handbook remains UN Women personnel who are involved with and manage evaluations.

The handbook follows the evaluation process through planning, preparation, conduct, reporting, evaluation, use, and follow-up. For each stage, the handbook has been updated to align with the current UN Women evaluation policy and coverage norms, as well as IES structure, governance, and processes.

In addition to providing up-to-date links to all guidance documents and references (including the 2020 United Nations Evaluation Group ethical guidance for evaluations, disability inclusion, and IES data management for evaluations), the handbook includes references to a rich set of new IES knowledge products, including:

• “Good practices in gender-responsive evaluation”;
• “UN Women rapid assessment tool to evaluate gender equality and women’s empowerment results in humanitarian contexts”;
• “Inclusive systemic evaluation for gender equality, environments, and marginalized voices (ISE4GEMs)”;
• “UN Women guidance note: Evaluating impact in gender equality and women’s empowerment”; and
• “Pocket tool for managing evaluation during the COVID-19 pandemic”.

The handbook also reflects recommendations on how to improve evaluations from recent IES Global Evaluation Reports Assessment and Analysis System reports.