Study on non-legislative initiatives for companies to promote gender ...

94 Gender equality initiatives
Monitoring and evaluation
Usually, the monitoring of non-legislative initiatives for the promotion of gender
equality in the workplace is an internal procedure at the implementing organisation.
They have available the numbers of participating and winning enterprises. In the field of
prizes, labels and charters, it can be generally asserted that the number of participating
enterprises has been increasing over time. This demonstrates that public interest and
attention towards the initiatives is rising. Only a few initiatives saw a decrease of
numbers, which might have its causes in a limited target group (e.g. enterprises in a
specific sector or in a specific geographic area) or also with a rising number of competing
initiatives in the field of gender equality in a certain country.
In the field of evaluation, it has been observed that in many cases there is no formal
evaluation in a strict sense. Regarding the content of initiatives, in order to show what
has been done, there are often annual reports and brochures presenting the outcomes
of a special initiative. Frequently, the term “evaluation” is connected with the improvement
of ongoing processes and with the adaptation of contents of initiatives to account
for changing conditions in the corporate landscape or in society. These aspects lead to
the adaptation of the initiative’s criteria, number of categories, adjustment of questions
or to the change of the focus or additional content. In terms of the structure of
initiatives, many initiatives state to have annual or recurring internal reflections, which
might lead to structural and organisational changes regarding the whole application and
awarding processes.