How to evaluate the gender perspective? Ecorys braves the Helsinki winter to participate in an EU conference…

On the 26th January 2012, Ecorys participated in a major European conference on "Evaluating the Gender Perspective in the Structural Funds" in Helsinki, organised by the European Community of Practice on Gender Mainstreaming in the European Social Fund ("Gender CoP").

Ecorys is currently carrying out the ongoing evaluation of the Gender CoP between 2011-2013.

The conference brought together 110 experts in evaluation of the Structural Funds from 18 EU Member States, ranging from evaluators to academics to managers of the Structural Funds at EU and Member State level. The speakers included high-level experts in the field; Maria Bustelo from the University of Madrid (Spain) and European Evaluation Society, and Liisa Horelli from Aalto University (Finland). The conference was opened by the Director General of the Finnish Ministry of Employment and the Economy.

The participants discussed approaches to evaluating the gender perspective in the Structural Funds, as well as the (many!) challenges involved and exchanged successful examples of implementation such as the gender budgeting approach from Germany. Issues discussed included the "gender blindness" of many mainstream evaluators which is detrimental to the quality of any evaluation. As Maria Bustelo demonstrated: "engendering evaluation is a way to improve quality"…

For more information and to download the presentations, please see: http://www.gendercop.com/seminar-on-evalaution-in-helsinki/