The Institutional Scorecard for Gender Mainstreaming is a new tool from the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) that aims to help institutions devise measures to ensure that both women/girls and men/boys can influence, participate and benefit from quality learning opportunities.

“COL’s gender scorecard will allow institutions to take a comprehensive look at the status of their gender mainstreaming practices and to see what is working, what is not working and what gaps need filling,” says Ms Rosanne Wong, COL Gender Equality Manager. “It also has a capacity-building element and, as a result, can serve as an empowering experience for staff.”

The tool determines the status of gender mainstreaming in an institution by assessing whether systems, practices and programs support gender equality and recommending ways to address gender-related gaps and challenges. It involves two main activities: evidence gathering, including document review, a survey questionnaire and interviews; and scoring, allocating a score for nine categories, each with their own performance indicators. The categories include: leadership and organisational culture, policy and priority setting, resource allocation and disbursement, capacity and competence, programming, partnerships, monitoring, accountability and employment equity.

Gender equality is central to COL’s agenda of learning for sustainable development, and COL has adopted gender mainstreaming as an organisational strategy.

The Institutional Scorecard for Gender Mainstreaming is available under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International License, making it free to download for reuse and adaptation with attribution to COL. It can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/11599/2731.