The AGEE Team presented a paper at the International Inequalities Institute 10th Anniversary Conference, ‘The III at 10: New Directions in Inequality Research’ at the London School of Economics, 18-19 September 2025.
Paper abstract:
Measuring gender equality in education has been an area characterised by a mixture of promise, disputed purposes, and sharp disagreements. As cross-national data on education has become increasingly available over the last few decades, tracking gender inequalities in education has been a growing feature of international campaigns, although initially focused on equal access to formal schooling (Vaughan, 2010; Leproni and Azara, 2025). In subsequent policy discussions the measurement of literacy became a key issue and , since the launch of the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, there have been sharp debates as to whether enrolment, attendance, learning outcomes, or children out of school should be measured. Disagreements regarding gender have centred on the purpose of measurement (Antrobus, 2006; Grek et al, 2020; Grek, 2023; Sen and Mukherjee, 2017), the definitions of gender to be deployed (Unterhalter, 2012; Evans et al, 2021), how or whether intersectionality is considered (Unterhalter et al, 2020; Male and Wodon, 2017), the reasons for missing data that have made indicators so difficult to formulate (Shephard and Delprato, 2024), and the politics of who is included in different discussions and why (Sen, 2019; Merry, 2011).
We have been both participants in and observers of these debates and the analysis we have made, partly through analytic discussion (Unterhalter et al, 2022; Unterhalter, 2017) and partly through the development of the AGEE (Accountability for Gender Equality in Education[1]) Framework and associated AGEE indicator dashboards for use by policymakers and practitioners at global, national and local level (see www.gendereddata.org). We are currently working with UNESCO on the Bridging AGEE project, which aims to improve gender equality in education through increased availability of gender-focused data to facilitate data driven knowledge, policy and practice. The form of work we are doing in AGEE has drawn criticisms (Auld and Morris, 2016; Grek, 2023) and encouragement (MacKenzie and Chiang, 2023; Murphy-Graham, 2024; Tao and Ul Abidin, 2025 forthcoming). The aim of this article is to situate our work on the AGEE cross-national dashboard in relation to the questions of promise, appraisal and practice that have been associated with initiatives for measuring gender equality in and through education, since the 1950s, and which arose in early stages of the AGEE project (which has been operational since 2018) and have continued to confront our work.
The purpose of any indicator framework needs ongoing review, as the context for developing it changes over time. Unterhalter (2017) raised four questions around thinking about measuring the unmeasurable in education, which present us with the complexities of the field of women’s rights, the multifaceted meanings of gender in general and the particular social indicators selected for measuring gender equality in and through education taking account of very different contexts in which the purposes, promises and participatory dynamics around policy and practice play out. These four questions are:
i) What are we measuring? Are we measuring what certain groups defined by binary gender categories of women/men or girls/boys do or do not have with regard to education? And if we are measuring something more than a pattern of distribution, what is it that we are measuring / looking for / assessing?
ii) Why are we measuring? Why are we interested in measuring gender equality in education? Are our reasons concerned with efficiency, with normative issues of justice or undoing unjust structures of gender inequality in and through education or some combination of these processes?
iii) How are we measuring? What kind of metric allows us to combine the descriptive, interpretative and normative concerns signalled by the concept of gender and the many facets of education? Are there other important dynamics associated with this concept of gender and the process of education that is about both being and becoming that our existing indicators do not frame?
iv) With whom are we measuring? Who is involved in discussing what features of gender and education, why, and how should we work together to develop social indicators for gender equality and education that do not replicate relationships of hierarchy and exclusion? Do subaltern voices ever speak and, if so, what do they say? (Unterhalter, 2019, pp 2-8).
These purposes linked with developing and using a measurement framework continue to concern us. In this paper we describe the process we have used to construct one of the innovations associated with the AGEE project – the AGEE cross-national dashboard, and an associated composite indicator of gender equality in education. We reflect critically on why, how and with whom we have conducted this work. Our analysis sets out how we have used the capability approach to conceptualise gender equality in and through education, and highlights some of the issues associated with the development of indicators in highly contested areas of value in relation to social policy.
The discussion is organised in four parts. In the first part we discuss some of the debates around promise, purpose and participation that have framed discussions of indicator frameworks in education, and we also explain how innovative work in the field of capabilities and measurement of inequalities was key to the design of our research. In particular, the capability approach entails participatory research; and the project has involved close work with a range of international partners, most frequently UNESCO and UNGEI, and at country level in Malawi, South Africa, Indonesia, Kenya and Sierra Leone.
In the second part, we give an outline overview of the work we have done since 2015 in constructing the AGEE Framework and associated cross-national AGEE dashboard. This section will set out the work done at the cross-national level in the AGEE project to create a series of national dashboards for gender equality in education. We present a novel approach to holistic measurement of ‘gender equality in education’ (GEE), bringing together a broad range of indicators across six domains set out in the AGEE Framework, which were selected through a participatory process and which aim to capture the complexity and nuance of gender inequalities ‘in and through’ education in and across a range of contexts. Further, this section will explain how we have constructed a composite indicator of GEE alongside a cross-national dashboard of indicators which can be used to benchmark and track progress towards GEE both nationally and globally.
In the third part we compare and contrast the AGEE cross-national dashboard with other frameworks that assemble cross national indicators of gender and girls’ education.
In the fourth part we reflect critically on the work we have done in response to the questions posed about measuring the unmeasurable in education. We also reflect overall on the strengths and challenges of the AGEE approach – conceptual, empirical and political – centring on the learning from ‘process’ (global, national and local) and context as well as result in the development of the AGEE measures. New global indicator frameworks are likely to be established for the post-2030 development goals, and we aim to draw on insights from the AGEE project to make a contribution on improving how to measure gender equality in and through education.
References
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