Gender equality
Without long-term strategies, dedicated resources, context-appropriate guidance, and local partnerships, gender equality commitments risk becoming a tick box exercise – or causing unintended harms.
This research highlights the gap between policy commitments and implementation realities, and identifies what it takes to close it.
Background:
Global gender equality frameworks increasingly shape how humanitarian organizations design their policies and programs. These frameworks are intended to guide action across diverse settings, but applying them in practice requires organizations to balance alignment with global norms with local sociocultural, legal, and political contexts.
Understanding how this process works in practice is essential for improving the effectiveness and sustainability of gender equality efforts in humanitarian response.
The Challenge:
Humanitarian organizations face ongoing tensions when implementing gender policies. Staff must adapt global and organizational standards to local realities while working under significant time, resource, and operational constraints. Interviewees described the challenges of carrying out gender-transformative programming in fast-paced and resource-constrained environments, and highlighted the importance of feedback mechanisms that allow local experience to inform organizational policies and global norm development.
What We Did:
This research examined how two international humanitarian organizations—the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and the International Rescue Committee (IRC)—interpret, adapt, and implement gender equality norms.
Methods:
The study combined an analysis of organizational policies and documents, and interviews with staff working at headquarters and in Iraq, Sierra Leone, and Uganda. Together, these methods provide insights into both formal commitments and the practical realities of implementing gender-related programming.
Key Findings
- Both organizations showed significant commitment to gender equality in their policies and programming.
- Time, funding, staff capacity, and long-term partnerships are critical for meaningful change. Without these, gender commitments risk becoming a tick-box exercise.
- Staff must balance organizational commitments with local cultural, legal, and political realities, sometimes requiring trade-offs in how programs are implemented.
- Heavy workloads, limited resources, and competing priorities can make gender integration difficult, even when staff are committed to these goals.
- Organizations play a key role in translating global norms into practical guidance and in bringing lessons from the field back into global policy discussions.
The findings suggest that meaningful progress on gender equality requires not only policy commitments but also sustained funding, practical guidance, and support for staff responsible for implementation.
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