Evaluation of equal opportunities between women and men in Emilia-Romagna

The aim of the evaluation service was to assess the support of the actions co-funded through ESF in Emilia-Romagna in the period 2007-2013 towards the gender equality objective. This entailed evaluating both gender specific actions, as well as all other actions in a gender mainstreaming perspective.

Specifically, the evaluation exercise took into due consideration main evaluative questions concerning ESF’s support to:

• Women’s participation in the strengthening of the knowledge economy
• Policies aimed at promoting the reconciliation between work and care duties, as foreseen in the unitary evaluation programme and thus referring to axes and priorities of funds other than ESF (such as ERDF and RDP)

From a database of 5000 ESF-financed projects, the project team selected and evaluated 400 projects, conducting then an in-depth evaluation for 80 of them.

Activities included:

• Provision of annual evaluation reports (2011 and 2012), in particular on:

- Start-up and preliminary analysis of the Regional Planning in a gender perspective

- Analysis of procedures of information and monitoring  systems from a gender perspective

- Evaluation analysis of the ESF progress from a gender perspective

- Evaluation of consistency with other operational programmes and instruments

• Participation to steering groups