Feminist analysts have agreed that existing quantitative measures of gender equality success and outcomes are often flawed or insufficient in various ways and do not accurately capture the complexities of gender equality. However, it is necessary for scholars and policymakers to have some systematic means to assess whether, how and to what extent gender equality within and across countries increases following the adoption of policies to improve it. The paper will present a measurement of gender equality that is currently being developed in the project on Gender Equality Policy in Practice (GEPP). GEPP brings together approaches from comparative public policy, feminist institutionalism and multi methods analysis to examine whether equality policies result in greater gender equality in western post industrial democracies. It focuses on the implementation of specific policies in multi-dimensional terms. The project operationalizes the effectiveness of the implementation of equality policy in terms of gender role transformation and women’s empowerment, considering effects both at the levels of policy output and policy outcomes. The paper is in six parts. First, we discuss the problem of measurement in the assessment of equality policy and situate it in the context of feminist standards of gender equality. Next, we explain the GEPP project and its ambitions to improve equality measurement. We then assess the established equality indicators that have been developed by various agencies, officials and experts. In the fourth section of the paper we consider and develop the feminist critique of these measures. We then present the GEPP measurement scheme which offers qualitative, quantitative and time sensitive indicators of our two dimensions of gender equality as they apply to both outputs and outcomes of policy. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the utility of our measurement to research on whether gender equality policy works.
