A Toolkit for Gender Diagnostics
Co-Authored By: Meera Pathmarajah and Lydia Wilbard
When leaders commit to thoughtfully integrating gender into their work, they tend to ask similar questions about the process. Who should spearhead the effort? What scope of work should we outline for a gender consultant? Should we consider engaging external expertise? In 2025, Echidna Giving documented lessons from 16 grantee partners who encountered such questions while pursuing gender-deepening work.
The result of this learning is a Gender Diagnostics Toolkit that provides a roadmap of promising approaches to help organizations make meaningful progress in gender diagnostics. Gender diagnostics are tools and processes that organizations use to gain strategic clarity on how to address gaps and promote equitable outcomes.
Drawing on insights and experiences shared by our partners, the toolkit helps clarify common gaps in knowledge, vocabulary, organizational processes, and leadership practices related to gender mainstreaming. Given the toolkit’s origin in pragmatic dilemmas and decision points, it was designed as a resource for education-focused organizations in particular, working to assess how gender shows up in programs, policies, and among teams.
From our effort to develop a practical toolkit, four key insights emerged.
1. We need to go beyond simple counting and parity.
Gender parity in enrollment is often seen as a good enough indicator for gender equality. But parity in enrollment does not necessarily equate to parity in learning outcomes, nor does it account for the millions of children who remain out of school. Moreover, it doesn’t address parity in participation and experience in the learning process. Do all girls and boys participate equally in classroom processes? Do teachers call on students equally, regardless of their backgrounds, to answer questions, participate in activities, contribute to decision-making processes, and take on leadership roles? These are the types of questions that the practice of consistently applying a gender lens can generate to examine whether and why inequalities exist, and how programs may unintentionally reinforce inequality.
The global learning crisis has rightly become a central concern for governments and education organizations, yet gender is still too often treated as an add-on rather than a core analytical lens. There is growing recognition that gender-responsive teaching leads to more equitable participation and learning. What’s needed is the hard work of understanding why opportunities that are normalized for boys remain inaccessible to girls in many contexts.
2. Gender equality work is achieved by learning to see gender.
At its core, gender deepening work begins with learning to see. It requires us to examine our own assumptions and biases. It requires us to question what we have come to accept as normal, and to engage in reflective conversations with colleagues, partners, and communities. Without reflection, both individually and collectively, we risk accepting social realities at face value. We miss considering historical narratives and structural forces that shape what appears ordinary.
Take school leadership as an example. In low- and middle-income countries, only 26% of school leaders are women, even though women make up the majority of primary school teachers. If we visit a school where a female principal struggles to convene the Parent Teacher Committee, we may view this as an isolated management challenge. Yet when viewed through a gender lens, the situation may reflect broader patterns of unequal access to leadership opportunities, gendered expectations about authority, and community attitudes that undermine women’s expertise. The individual experience becomes connected to a larger system.
The same principle applies to program design. In India, for example, a distance-learning initiative for adolescent girls who have dropped out of school may appear highly gender-responsive. It expands educational opportunities for girls who would otherwise be excluded. Yet if the program does not also challenge restrictions on girls’ mobility, it may inadvertently reinforce the very norms that contributed to their exclusion in the first place. A girl gains access to education, but remains confined to the home. If we miss this, we lose crucial analysis about other forces at play; for instance, why, despite rising rates of girls’ education, India’s women’s labor force participation is among the lowest globally.
Unless we intentionally examine such patterns, within ourselves and within our organizations, we risk reproducing assumptions and biases every day through our decisions, policies, and interactions.
Starting these conversations can be uncomfortable. But they challenge deeply held beliefs and expose blind spots in how we design programs and manage teams. They can help shift the way organizations analyze and use data. Reflective conversations about gender just might be one of the most powerful ways organizations can shift mindsets and strengthen their work.
3. Gender is constant: catch it early & examine it always.
Although girls and boys frequently demonstrate similar learning outcomes in early childhood, those outcomes can mask unequal experiences, opportunities, and expectations that shape children’s schooling. Gender norms are learned early and reinforced continuously. Children absorb messages about who belongs where, who leads, who cares, who speaks, and who listens. These messages are communicated through families, schools, media, communities, and institutions. Over time, they become so familiar that they appear natural.
While growing evidence affirms adolescence as a critical moment when gender norms constrain girls’ opportunities, considerably less attention has been paid to the influence of gender in shaping young minds. This is perhaps because feminist movements have historically brought attention and awareness to challenges facing adolescent girls and women, including child marriage and gender-based violence. As a result, we often find that organizations working in Early Childhood Education and Foundational Learning tend to be early in their gender journeys compared to organizations tackling gender inequality among adolescent girls and women.
4. Tools are only as good as the depth of thinking that goes into using them
To “live” gender is to consistently apply a gender lens in understanding how inequality is produced and sustained. Creating opportunities for reflective conversations within organizations is key to building individual and team awareness of how norms and behaviors come to appear natural over time. When such spaces are not embedded within organizational work cultures, gender work can become performative, or worse, we might unintentionally reproduce the inequalities we seek to address.
The journey is rarely straightforward. Engaging critically with questions of gender and power requires courage, vulnerability, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable realities. It demands time and resources that are often in short supply. It also requires leaders who are willing to champion change even when progress feels slow.
Our hope is that more education organizations will come to view gender not as a separate workstream, but as an integral way of understanding the world. Like learning a language, building a gender lens requires practice. Once developed, however, it becomes a transferable skill that can also help organizations engage more thoughtfully with other dimensions of identity, inclusion, and power.
We invite you to explore the toolkit and share your reflections. What resonates? What feels missing? What challenges have you encountered in your own organization’s gender journey? We would love to learn alongside you.
