2.1 What is a Gender Equality Marker?
A gender equality marker (GEM) is a financial tracking tool used to classify and systematize the extent to which development interventions contribute to the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. It facilitates the allocation and tracking of financial resources for gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Through the application of gender equality markers, UN entities can better ensure that gender equality is integrated in programme planning and budget allocation processes. As more UN entities integrate GEMs into their enterprise resource planning systems, entities will be better able to track their finances, with a focus on measuring various levels of commitment to gender equality and the empowerment of women.
2.2 Why implement a GEM-System?
There are many reasons to implement gender equality markers.
Putting Gender Equality on the Agenda
- To make visible an entity’s contribution to the achievement of gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls, including the budget spent.
- To promote a more gender mainstreamed response so that development interventions are not gender blind.
Greater Accountability & Transparency
- To serve as a financial tracking mechanism and therefore as an accountability mechanism for gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Improving program quality
- To enhance planning and programming processes for gender equality and the empowerment of women, and to improve the quality of interventions.
- To bring about a new and deeper perspective on who benefits, what can be achieved, and what kind of impact has resulted from UN interventions at global, regional and country levels by incorporating gender equality in the planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of interventions, including in budget allocations.
- To ensure that development interventions at a minimum do no harm
- To establish an iterative process where planning and implementation are linked
Capacity Building and Learning Loops
- To contribute to strengthened institutional and staff capacities on gender equality by inserting discussions of gender mainstreaming into programming and budgeting decisions.
Mobilizing finance for gender equality
- Gender equality marker data can be used to track financial support for gender equality and inform decisions on funding allocations.
- To identify gaps between policy and financial commitments and galvanize efforts to reduce deficits.
- To support increased financial resource allocations for gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.
2.3 The Gender Equality Marker (GEM) & the IASC Gender with Age Marker (GAM)
The Gender with Age Marker (GAM), which is managed by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), is a tool used as part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) Humanitarian Program Cycle (HPC) project module. The GAM tracks and assesses how gender-related activities are incorporated into humanitarian projects at the organizational, country and global levels.
It focuses on improving attention to gender and age in program design, implementation and monitoring by coding users’ projects on a four point scale ( 0–4) using ten Gender Equality Measures. Four of them (gender analysis, tailored activities, influence on project, and benefits) are used in projects’ design phase, while the remaining six are used in the monitoring phase. Unlike the GEM, the IASC GAM does not track financial allocations or expenditures or provide any measure of financial commitments to gender equality. Since 2019, the GAM has been used to screen all humanitarian projects seeking funding under an active Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP).
While the gender equality marker also enhances an intervention’s focus on gender equality considerations, particularly in the design phase, it is importantly integrated into an entity’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and therefore can be used to track financial commitments and expenditures to gender equality and the empowerment of women.
Both markers can be used jointly and in complementary ways in a humanitarian context, each building on the strengths of the other.
