Improving Research with a Gender Sensitive Approach
How is Gender Relevant in Academic Research?
Trying to write a ‘gender equality statement’ in your research proposal? Need to understand your project’s impacts on gender equality? Our toolkit is here for you!
We know from experience that new technologies interact with existing social structures – such as gender inequality. Practitioners in International Development are already well-versed in techniques to identify and mitigate asymmetrical gender impacts. But their tools can be hard to apply in academic settings, so we created a simple 5-step tool for HE researchers.
On this part of GENDER.ED’s site, you’ll find briefings and clips on specific themes such as agriculture, climate change, economics, and IT, to help you understand how gender is relevant to your research and to help you start conversations with colleagues.
Our simplified approach to ‘Gender Sensitive Situational Analysis’ is the best place to start.
Your Project: Working Out How Gender is Relevant
Our short, simplified tool is aimed at academic researchers, who are new to dealing with gender equality requirements, particularly those in STEMM. Using it will enable you to work out how gender is relevant to your academic project and what you can do to maximise the benefits it delivers.

Experts Explain: Five-Minute Clips on Gender Sensitive Research
Why Gender Sensitive Research is Important: Engineering and Infrastructure Examples
Gender and Human Computer Interaction
Doing Gender Sensitive Economics Research
Gender Sensitive Agricultural Research
Engineering Humanitarian Technology Interventions of Gender
Gender and Fieldwork
Building Capacity and Mainstreaming Gender: Case Study Makerere University, Uganda
Supporting Gender Equal Participation in Science
Feminist International Collaborations: A Best Practice Example of an Interdisciplinary and Participatory Approach
Project team
Dr Rosalind Cavaghan is the Project Manager and Lead Researcher of the ‘Doing Gender Sensitive Research’ Project. She is an independent scholar and consultant who manages GENDER.ED's SFC/GCRF funded project ‘Integrating Gender into GCRF Funding Bids and Projects’. The project aims to increase gender sensitive research capacity across all disciplines, especially STEM at Edinburgh and in partner institutions. Her research applies a feminist political economy lens to EU macro economic policy, climate transition policies and post-Brexit trade policy, focusing on intersectional policy impacts and bureaucratic and civil society knowledge production processes, that seek to promote or challenge existing policy.
Fiona Mackay is the founding Director of GENDER.ED (2017-2022). She is a feminist political scientist at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the impact of gender reform efforts during periods of restructuring and institutional change, addressing the extent to which global and local institutions of politics and governance may be designed or reformed to address gender inequality and promote gender justice.