GenderLens Monitor

🔹After the elections, it’s time to ask the real questions: What are our elected officials doing for women?

🔍 Why do we need GenderLens Monitor?

📌 In 2024, Romania and the European Union entered a new electoral cycle. This is the perfect moment to assess whether – and how – newly elected representatives are fulfilling their commitments to gender equality.

📉 Romania ranks last among EU countries in the Gender Equality Index, scoring only 57.5 out of 100 (EIGE, 2024). The most significant vulnerabilities include:

• the lack of women in decision-making roles
• unequal distribution of unpaid care work
• and persistent violence against women – too often invisible and unpunished

💡 Faced with these challenges, many women’s organisations still lack effective tools to monitor political activity and respond quickly. That’s why we need simple, transparent and locally relevant solutions.

🛠️ What are we building?

We are developing GenderLens Monitor – A Feminist Accountability Toolkit for Romania: a practical, intuitive, and user-friendly digital tool that can be used by any individual or organisation interested in monitoring political action from a feminist perspective.

🔎 The toolkit will focus on three key areas:

• Violence against women
• Women’s participation in decision-making
• Care work and the balance between professional and personal life

📲 Co-created with ROWL’s member organisations, the toolkit will be built using feminist indicators and real-world examples. It will be made available in a simple digital format (e.g., Google Forms), accessible even for grassroots or informal groups with limited technical capacity.

🤝 The toolkit will offer a common framework for analysing political commitments through a gender lens, helping feminist organisations collaborate more effectively and advocate with stronger evidence.

🌍 European Engagement

To ensure broader visibility and peer learning, the project team will participate in key events in Brussels. We will present GenderLens Monitor to:

🎯 Romanian representatives in the European Commission
🎯 Members of the European Parliament
🎯 Feminist networks and EU-level stakeholders

💬Women’s rights must not remain just words on paper. It’s time to demand transparency, track political commitments, and build – together – a truly equal democracy.

🔹GenderLens Monitor – A Feminist Accountability Toolkit for Romania is a project by the Romanian Women’s Lobby (ROWL), implemented between May and November 2025.

🔹Co-funded by the European Union through the CERV – Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme, as part of the EWL Membership Support Regranting Scheme 2025.

🟪 This project is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.

____________________________________________________________________________________ROWL has launched GenderLens Monitor – a feminist tool for monitoring and public accountability

Between May and November 2025, the Romanian Women’s Lobby implemented the project GenderLens Monitor – A Feminist Accountability Toolkit for Romania, funded through the EWL Membership Support Regranting Scheme 2025, with a total budget of €8,900. Within the project, ROWL developed and piloted an accessible digital tool designed to support women’s organizations in monitoring the actions of national and European parliamentarians in the field of gender equality.

The toolkit was built around three strategic areas of gender equality:

• violence against women,
• care and work–life balance,
• women in decision-making.

Throughout the project, ROWL conducted internal consultations, defined feminist indicators tailored to the Romanian context, and designed an easy-to-use digital tool (Google Forms), later tested together with at least five ROWL member organizations. The final version was accompanied by a short English-language presentation for practice-sharing within the EWL network.

The GenderLens Monitor toolkit can be downloaded here.

In the autumn of 2025, the ROWL team participated in two major European events, where they presented the tool and strengthened dialogue with representatives of EU institutions, Members of the European Parliament, and European feminist networks. These engagements contributed to promoting a shared monitoring framework and increasing the visibility of feminist priorities from Romania at the European level.

The project concluded with a national visibility campaign, which included more than 10 public materials and the launch of a dedicated section on the ROWL website, where the toolkit and related resources were made available to interested organizations.

GenderLens Monitor remains a long-term resource for the ROWL network and for the feminist movement in Romania, strengthening a shared culture of public accountability and advocacy built on solid foundations.

🔹 Co-funded by the European Union through the CERV – Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values Programme, under the EWL Membership Support Regranting Scheme 2025.

The toolkit can be downloaded HERE.

This project is co-funded by the European Union. The views expressed belong solely to the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). The European Union and EACEA cannot be held responsible for them.