Our gender data and measurement strategy aims to influence change in four strategic areas:
- Build Capacity to improve the production, availability, accessibility and use of quality data and statistics on issues related to gender equality and women’s empowerment across National Statistical Officers (NSOs) and promote national accountability to the SDGs.
- Build the Evidence Base to transform programs and policies, by generating higher-quality evidence, disseminating it broadly, and building a stronger research and evaluation field on gender equality through in-country hubs.
- Sustain Global Momentum and Accountability to support platforms that raise awareness, availability and use of quality gender data with policy-makers and practitioners worldwide.
- Fill Gender Data, Methods and Analysis Gaps to support the development and empirical testing of improved gender measures. Deepen innovation in data capture and analysis. Bring both together in platforms and spaces to improve use and learning across different sectors.
The Senior Program Officer (SPO) will build, implement and refine the gender data and evidence strategy; including formulating theories of change, identifying and enabling connections across program and policy work, and leading partner landscaping activities. An emphasis of this sub-initiative includes evaluation field building and overseeing a global research portfolio that has a geographic concentration in East Africa and India. This is a role that will appeal to a creative and energetic problem-solver dedicated to addressing gaps in gender data and evidence, and who can clearly communicate how both can be used to realize the vision of gender equality and encourage an open dialogue on evidence.
As a collaborator and energizer, you will also be expected to lead investment management and development activities related to:
- Overseeing a portfolio of complex investments intended to fill priority gender data gaps and strengthen and advance gender measures, data, evaluation, evidence, and use. This will include partner identification, reviewing letters of inquiry and grant proposals; providing clear, concise and insightful written analyses and recommendations for funding, drafting and editing proposal summaries and progress reports.
- Shaping new investments to measure and track gender data and evidence gaps and fill methodological innovations, particularly in women’s economic empowerment (e.g. measuring empowerment, developing new indices, filling gaps in existing measures).
- Lead monitoring and learning across the gender data portfolio including assessing progress and documenting and sharing learnings.
- Deepening the field of gender statistics, data, measurement, and evaluation by building networks among researchers, statisticians, evaluators, and bilateral, multilateral institutions.
- Commissioning rigorous evaluations on priority gender equality programs / policies to enrich the evidence base; commissioning cross-geography synthetic reviews to underpin these investments.
- Get evidence off the shelf by making it widely accessible and applicable to local contexts, helping key stakeholders adapt and adopt evidence findings, and exploring local barriers to uptake.
- Partnering with colleagues from the foundation’s Global Policy and Advocacy team to ensure that policy makers and program advocates are informed with compelling evidence on what works for gender equality and that advocacy investments are connected to gender data and research investments in East Africa.
Additionally, you will be expected to:
- Advance the overall results and measurement framework of the Gender Equality team’s work, supporting cutting-edge, evidence-based, and results-focused approaches.
- Synthesize and analyze evidence to summarize progress and develop progress reports and related materials for foundation leadership.
- Cultivate high quality interactions and clear and consistent communications with grantees and partners in the field to represent the foundation’s perspective on gender data and evidence.
- Serve as an internal and external advocate for organizing effort and investment on gender measures, data and evaluation across foundation program teams and within the broader stakeholder community (grantees, donors, NGOs, governments, beneficiaries, etc.).
We believe that energized people, working well together, fueled by great leadership in an inclusive environment in which they thrive, will do phenomenal things.
We are looking for people who enjoy the opportunity of working on complex problems and collectively creating solutions that have the potential for transformative change in the lives of people around the world. You must be prepared to work across a diverse set of disciplines, bridging a wide range of expertise all the while being a team player, with a demonstrated ability to work with flexibility, efficiency and diplomacy in an exciting, challenging environment.
The responsibilities of this role require that you should have deep technical expertise and experience with low and middle-income (LMIC) country data, research and evaluation systems, and an understanding of the measurement and evaluation ecosystem of players. Specific measurement and evaluation skills and experience related to gender, specifically women’s economic empowerment, desired. Additionally, you should have:
- A proven ability to generate results in gender measurement and gender policy evaluation.
- Strong knowledge of and experience with a variety of qualitative and quantitative research methods including research and evaluation design, data analysis techniques, statistics; experience assessing performance against goals.
- Experience strengthening gender measures, data quality, generation, or use in research fields, LMIC and/or global contexts.
- Recognized externally by the global professional community as an expert in at least one of the following areas: gender data, gender analysis, gender evaluation, women’s economic empowerment evaluation.
- Experience in grant-making, portfolio design, delivering on grant or other investment approaches whether from philanthropy or international funding environment.
- Excellent written, facilitation and oral communications skills effective with a broad and diverse audience.
- Demonstrated strategic thinker able to execute a work plan to achieve established goals.
- Experience developing and managing strong partnerships and relationships.
- Able to respond quickly and produce a range of deliverables of high quality within tight timeframes; all the while working independently and within a small team environment.
- Ability to multi-task and set priorities in an efficient and self-managed, self-motivated manner.
- Ability and willingness to question and challenge colleagues, including managers and partners in constructive, respectful, and open manner.
- Ability and comfort working in a highly matrixed environment.
- Ability to travel up to 25% domestically and internationally.
- Advanced degree (e.g. Economics, Statistics, or other relevant social science) and 10+ years of “actionable measurement” experience in the use of data, measurement and evaluation in gender equality programming/policy related to women’s economic empowerment.
- A sense of humor.
- Commitment to the foundation’s core values, mission and programs with an approach that is consistent with the foundation’s guiding principles while holding oneself to the highest ethical standards.
Additional experiences that would be deemed an asset but is not required:
- Experience with modelling, cost effectiveness, or data visualization to extract appropriate data to convey complex information using supporting tables, graphs and other visual representations.
- Familiarity with ‘big data’ or machine learning / AI applications.
- Experience in civil society or other forms of non-governmental data generation or innovations in data capture (rapid rolling surveys, crowd sourcing, etc.).
- Understanding of data systems and gaps in LMIC countries (nature and state of national survey systems and sources of data; existing challenges and opportunities of statistics offices).