Equity Audit

What is an equity audit?

An equity audit surveys entities- including governments, boards, and commissions- through a gendered lens, to determine the degree to which gender equality has been institutionalized. We are employing the terms "gender" and "women" through an intersectional lens. We strive to represent and recognize all women, regardless of their age, race, color, creed, abilities, socio-economic status, immigration status, sexual orientation, or gender identity at birth.

Our Vision:

Could include, but is not limited to:

  • Gathering information on gender representation in key roles within governments, boards, and commissions.

We hope this project provides a tool for other cities and municipalities to frame the assessment of gender equality in their regions. We work to ensure that women have access to the necessary opportunities and resources to thrive.

Our Status: We are collaborating with researchers from UMass Boston and UMass Lowell to actualize our vision. Currently, we are in the process of literature review and the gathering of existing data on the status of women in Massachusetts. We have identified Arlington and Lowell as the two communities in which our equity audit projects will be piloted, due to their varied population sizes and composition. The UMass Boston team will focus on context in the town of Arlington and UMass Lowell will focus on the city of Lowell, with all team members working collaboratively to design a process that will fit both communities and serve as a model for others. The researchers from UMass Boston have received an internal grant for our equity audit pilot. We plan to execute our pilot beginning this August. We hope the pilot will offer a systematic, collaborative, and community-engaged approach to the conduct of equity audits in municipalities across Massachusetts – something that has not been done since the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy coordinated a major initiative following the Beijing Platform for Action in the late 1990s.

Our Small-Scale Goals:

  • Bring shape to our ideas through interactions with other stakeholders

  • Identify partners in appropriate government agencies and community organizations in the local context and outline a generalizable model regarding key stakeholders to include in any community

  • Determine populations and topics of focus as well as inequity measures to include, based on available data.

Our Medium-Scale Goals:

  • Pilot a Gender Audit with a city or town from our region

  • Educate the relevant departments of the pilot on gender equality

  • Craft a recommendation for the piloted region to achieve a better degree of gender equity

Our Large-Scale Goals:

  • Implement the audit on a larger scale

  • Prompt a "bottom-up" effect with the production a state-wide gender audit.

Sources of Inspiration:

Pittsburgh's Report on the City's Inequality Across Gender and Race. The report details health, income, employment, and education among white, black, and AMLON (Asian, Multiracial, Latinx, Other, and Native American) women and men. The report finds that for White residents, the Pittsburgh experience is similar to that in other US cities. For AMLON residents, especially women, Pittsburgh ranks at or above average. However, for black residents, especially women, Pittsburgh falls below other cities. The data provides a framework to better city-wide equity, specifying target areas such as maternal mortality, low rates in the labor force, and occupation segregation for black women:

Pittsburgh's Inequality Across Gender and Race


San Francisco's analysis of the number of women appointed to City Commissions, Boards, and Task Forces. The data, surveyed annually, finds that since 2009, there has been a small but steady increase in the representation of women on San Francisco policy bodies. This resource is a means to keep entities accountable:

2019 Gender Analysis of Commissions and Boards