How to use the tool

The table of contents on the right provides links to descriptions and rationals of all the areas and domains they consist of. The actual questionnaire of the tool is composed of five sections – one per each area for measuring parliaments’ gender-sensitivity. The sections are assessed together and separately to measure the parliament's gender sensitivity.

The tool is available in three different versions: NATIONAL and REGIONAL for internal parliamentary use and requires a login, and a GENERAL version, which is available without a login for all interested users. The tool will automatically send you to the correct questionnaire, according to your login details. Parliaments are strongly encouraged to register using a shared parliamentary email address as opposed to a personal one, so that the parliament's access to the tool is not tied to a single employee's login details.

Please note that the tool has been designed to give a snapshot of the level of gender-sensitivity of the parliament. It is a self-assessment instrument that can be used as a starting point for institutional transformation; the tool highlights areas that can be improved, but will not per se be enough to change processes. Other frameworks are available for parliaments that are willing to commence a thorough institutional transformation process, such as the gender assessment methodology and gender-sensitive parliaments work by the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), and EIGE’s tool on Institutional Transformation for Public Administrations

The national and regional questionnaires have been developed so that a single user can fill in data. However, registering as a parliament indicates an approval and commitment from the institution, not the individual. It is strongly recommended to collect the data in cooperation with relevant units and political parties within the parliament. The questions specific to these versions of the tool concern the working conditions of the members of parliament (MPs), politically appointed staff members (staff working for the political groups), and other staff members (e.g. administration, services).

When national level data are publicly available, the tool automatically fills it into the questionnaire. 

Once all the questions within an area have been filled in, the results can be viewed. In order to save the answers and the results, the user has to login with an official parliamentary e-mail address.

Since parliaments are different across Europe, some questions/indicators might not perfectly fit a single country context. When relevant, the “not applicable” option is provided, but users are suggested to limit this choice in order to obtain an assessment as detailed as possible.

Non-parliamentary users can access the open access general version of the questionnaire that includes a subset of the indicators from the nationald and regional versions, to assess the gender-sensitivity of parliaments.