Looking for evidence-based solutions to advance gender equity? There’s a GAP for that

The Gender Action Portal, based at the Women and Public Policy Program, aggregates and translates research on gender. In its first 10 years it has become an invaluable tool for policymakers, researchers, and more.

Behavioral economics consultant Raafi Alidina MPP 2016 was recently working with a client looking to increase the percentage of women in leadership at their company. They were open to a variety of approaches to accomplish the goal; they just wanted something with data to back it up.

What about gender-based quotas, they asked Alidina. Do quotas work?

To answer this question, he turned to the Gender Action Portal (GAP). The research aggregator and translation tool is a product of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. It features summaries of over 300 studies related to gender—including, as Alidina found, several studies on gender quotas.

He used two studies to inform his recommendation to the client—one, from India, showed success after gender-based quotas, while a second, from Norway, cautioned that “quota hires” weren’t taken seriously. Given the differing results, Alidina recommended a hybrid model based on findings from both studies, with quotas in some areas and targets in others.

“The Gender Action Portal gave me a way to start that conversation based on evidence,” Alidina said. “It’s my first go-to with anything around gender.”

He is not alone in this. GAP is regularly used to inform the work of researchers, policymakers, and journalists, as well as DEI practitioners like Alidina. It has been cited hundreds of times since launching in 2014, including in a study on gender-based violence in Mexico, in the book Invisible Women by author Caroline Criado-Perez, and in an op-ed by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Just as it reached its 10th year, GAP also hit another milestone: More than 1 million unique users have now visited the portal.

“As the audience continues to grow and the knowledge base of GAP studies expands as well, WAPPP is able to equip an increasing number of people and organizations with the insights they need to make change.”

For GAP’s principal investigator, Iris Bohnet, the Albert Pratt Professor of Business and Government and co-director of the Women and Public Policy Program, reaching 1 million users was “a powerful moment.”

“It has been gratifying to see the number of new users increase, year over year, since we launched the portal,” Bohnet said. “The thinking behind GAP was that it would be a tool to inform data-driven policy, practices, and procedures related to gender equity, and make the best available evidence accessible around the globe. I am delighted that so many people and organizations are benefitting from GAP.”

When Bohnet and her colleagues at WAPPP launched the Gender Action Portal, they envisioned a tool to connect policymakers, organizational leaders, and change-makers across sectors to rigorous research on gender equity, said WAPPP Director of Research and Programs Anisha Asundi.

“We wanted to take things a step further from identifying gender gaps and focus on what works to close these gaps,” said Asundi, who has worked on the portal since its inception. “Then people could use GAP to test and evaluate what might work in their own contexts.”

With support from donors including Abigail Disney, Pivotal Ventures, Lara Warner, and the Harvard Kennedy School Women’s Leadership Board, the Women and Public Policy Program was able to make this vision a reality.

As the team built out the research available through GAP, it kept a relatively narrow focus—research summarized had to examine how to close gender gaps and, whenever possible, it was experimental.

“The reason for the emphasis on experiments, often in the field, is that this research methodology is the gold standard for impact assessment,” Bohnet said. “With experimental research, you can see what works, what doesn’t, and what might have the potential to effect change.”

GAP started out with just a handful of studies, including by future Nobel Laureates Claudia Goldin and Esther Duflo, as well as Bohnet and WAPPP co-director Hannah Riley Bowles, the Roy E. Larsen Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management. From its inception, GAP’s workflow always included multiple rounds of revisions for each summary and a final review by the research paper’s original authors to ensure accuracy.

Ten years later, Asundi said she is still grateful to the first researchers who trusted them to represent their work on GAP. In its early days the tool was, fittingly, an experiment in and of itself.

Part of the reason the experiment became such a success was because GAP filled a need. For people like Alidina, who was an HKS student at the time, GAP became a go-to resource because of its value as an accessible, easy-to-use aggregator of research on gender. There had previously been nothing like it.

“I’d had the experience before of seeing that there’s a lot of gender research out there, but it’s not always easy to find, and it can be time-consuming to look through,” he explained.

When he graduated from the Kennedy School and joined the diversity-focused organizational consulting firm Included, Alidina kept right on using GAP.

Organizations like Included, recruitment software company Applied, DEI-certification analytics firm Edge Empower, gender consultancy Aequales, and educational art non-profit genEquality—all co-founded by HKS alums—are frequent GAP users. They operate in different areas but are all able to make use of research insights translated by GAP. For Applied, findings summarized on GAP might inform a new version of software that eliminates an element of hiring bias; while Included might share GAP summaries with a client ahead of an equity workshop—much less daunting pre-reading than journal articles.

In Alidina’s experience, the portal is the perfect bridge between academia and practice.

“Academic research can be very inaccessible,” he said. “The length and style of writing, for one; but the biggest barrier is, as a practitioner, I can’t read a research paper published in an academic journal even if I want to because my company doesn’t have journal access.”

Policymakers and advisors find GAP useful for similar reasons—they have neither the time nor the financial resources to search for and read through dense academic publications. For example, staff at U.N. Women, the United Nation’s entity dedicated to gender equality, might not have been able to easily find and cite a 2012 study on the significance of women’s leadership for young girls, but they found what they needed on GAP and were able to share their source.

DEI consultancies and policymaking groups like U.N. Women are the kind of user WAPPP expected, Asundi said, but some of the ways GAP has evolved over the years were less predictable.

“The audience has definitely grown,” she said. “Our first audience was policymakers, but we’ve also become a tool for making research more accessible to the general public.”

GAP has been used to advance gender equity in a variety of contexts—from the National Science Foundation looking to help educators teach inclusive and accurate science, to Kosovo’s national government and USAID developing a climate action plan with women in decision-making groups.

GAP citations have also shown up on the CVs of academics whose research is summarized on the portal, Asundi said. “Their priority is typically publishing in peer-reviewed journals, so they’ve been thankful that GAP can extend the reach of their research.”

She added that the portal has also become a popular source for journalists. Last year alone, GAP was cited in a breadth of news stories in coverage across the globe.

When India passed a law last September on parliamentary gender quotas, for instance, Vox journalists analyzing the law's potential impact used two GAP studies to give readers evidence-based context for the issue. Several months later, Hunstville, Alabama, reporter Sarah Zupko was covering an event on the gender pay gap at a local college, and turned to GAP to find credible information on an issue she said is frequently misunderstood.

“Solid research is the foundation of high-quality journalism,” Zupko said, “and the Gender Action Portal makes world-class research available to journalists and their readership.”

Making GAP open to all is “empowering,” she added. “It empowers journalists and readers to verify data, to understand research in its original context, and to continue their own exploration of crucial topics.”

Asundi said she continues to be pleasantly surprised by the places that GAP citations show up, but the portal has made an impact in other ways, as well.

Over the years, GAP has become such an established research aggregation and translation tool that it has inspired similar tools—including the Race, Research, and Policy Portal (RRAPP), which is also based at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Miriam Aschkenasy, program director for the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability Project that developed RRAPP, said the portal was conceived to be “like GAP, but focused on research and policy in the antiracism space.”

When Aschkenasy’s team received grant funding to launch RRAPP in 2020, “I had a roadmap,” she said. Asundi shared many policies and procedures with Aschkenasy that helped set them up for success. Four years later, RRAPP features 127 articles and has more than 57,000 pageviews.

“Working with Anisha to launch RRAPP was a perfect example of collaboration,” Aschkenasy said. “It made both these programs better and has helped us all better uplift very important, marginalized voices.”

GAP has focused more on intersectionality in recent years, making a public commitment to this in 2021. This changed the way some work was presented and meant intentionally including more studies on the intersection of gender and race, gender and caste, gender and sexual orientation, and other dimensions of inequity.

From an ambitious experiment with a handful of research summaries, the Gender Action Portal has expanded to include 319 studies and counting, from 823 researchers in 47 countries.

“Seeing the way that our audience has grown over the last decade and the amount of people this has impacted has been really amazing,” Asundi said.

Bohnet agrees, adding that one of the most meaningful things about GAP’s continued growth is that its users are not passive—they’re not an audience in the traditional sense.

“Users are not just reading the content available to them on GAP; they’re sharing it and applying it,” Bohnet said. “It is intended to spur data-informed action. As the audience continues to grow and the knowledge base of GAP studies expands as well, WAPPP is able to equip an increasing number of people and organizations with the insights they need to make change.

“In the next 10 years, with the next million users, we’re excited to see all the ways this knowledge is applied.”