A framework for evaluating women’s leadership programmes

The increase in women’s leadership programmes has been paralleled by a growing demand on behalf of private and public sector stakeholders for pragmatic reporting on impact assessment. Yet, there remains limited research and tools available for conducting evaluation of women’s leadership programmes. Based on an extensive review of the literature and co-design with a sub-national Australian government, we develop an evaluation framework for women’s leadership programmes. Our framework identifies critical measures and indicators at a micro, meso and macro level that can be used by researchers and practitioners to measure the impact of women’s leadership programmes on women (and minoritised genders), organisations and structures – wider gender equality. We argue that evaluation is valuable in understanding the impact that women’s leadership programmes have as well as the impact they do not have – providing more rigorous analysis of the sometimes tenuous impacts of women’s leadership programmes. Such evaluation is critical to identifying women’s leadership programmes’ roles in tackling gender inequalities and women’s continued under-representation in leadership. It may also help identify other interventions and policy and legislative change needed to bring about a desired change.