Gender lens grantmaking is the practice of applying gender analysis throughout the grantmaking process — from strategy design and grant criteria to assessment, reporting, and learning. It goes beyond simply funding women's organisations to examining how gender shapes access to funding, who benefits from grants, and whether grantmaking practices inadvertently reinforce gender inequity.
Gender lens grantmaking is often misunderstood as simply funding programmes that target women. While that's one component, a genuine gender lens is broader:
Funding gaps are gendered. Research consistently shows that women-led organisations receive less philanthropic funding than organisations led by men, even when controlling for organisation size and sector. Gender lens grantmaking identifies and seeks to correct these patterns.
Service design is gendered. Programmes not designed with gender in mind frequently serve men as the default and fail women and gender-diverse people. A health programme designed without gender analysis may miss the barriers women face in accessing services.
Grant processes can create gender barriers. Formal application requirements, relationship-based funding, and organisational criteria that favour established institutions can all systematically disadvantage women-led organisations, which are disproportionately small and informal.
Outcomes are gendered. Community outcomes have different impacts on women and men. A jobs programme that achieves employment outcomes may be placing men in full-time roles and women in part-time or precarious roles — a gender-aggregated outcome count hides this.
Strategy and programme design:
- Conduct a gender analysis of the sector you're funding: who delivers services, who receives them, what are the gender dynamics of the problem you're trying to address?
- Set explicit gender equity goals where relevant — not as box-ticking, but as programme strategy
- Consider whether programme design creates barriers for women-led organisations (minimum size requirements, requirement for audited accounts, etc.)
Eligibility and criteria:
- Review eligibility criteria for gender bias — criteria that require board structures, registered status, or organisational scale can exclude grassroots women-led groups
- Consider whether criteria require outcomes that are harder for women's organisations to demonstrate (e.g., economic return metrics)
- Actively recruit women-led organisations and gender-equity-focused applicants, rather than expecting they'll self-select in
Assessment:
- Train assessors to recognise and counter gender bias in application review — women tend to undersell in applications, while men tend to oversell
- Include at least one assessor with gender expertise on panels funding in relevant areas
- Monitor assessment scores for systematic gender bias — do women-led organisations score lower on particular criteria? Why?
Funding decisions and portfolio analysis:
- Track the gender profile of funded organisations — what proportion are led by women? By non-binary people?
- Analyse whether funding amounts differ by leadership gender
- Monitor whether multi-year funding disproportionately goes to organisations led by men
Grantee relationships and reporting:
- Ask grantees to disaggregate outcome data by gender — not as a burden, but because it produces better information
- Be aware that women-led organisations often have less capacity for reporting — consider proportionality
- Support grantees to strengthen their gender analysis capacity
Learning and evaluation:
- Include gender as a lens in programme evaluations
- Share what you learn about gender dynamics in your sector — funders have a unique vantage point
New Zealand has a strong foundation for gender lens grantmaking:
Community trusts and gaming trusts are important funders in this space. Some have explicit priority areas for women's wellbeing; others address gender as part of broader equity commitments.
Feminist philanthropy goes further than gender lens grantmaking, explicitly naming gender justice as a goal and applying feminist principles — power analysis, centering those most marginalised, challenging extractive practices — to the philanthropic relationship itself.
This includes practices like:
- Unrestricted funding — trusting women-led organisations to make their own decisions about priorities
- Multi-year funding — providing stability that allows organisations to build capacity, not just deliver programmes
- Peer assessment — involving women from communities being funded in assessment decisions
- Reducing application burden — proportionate, accessible application processes that don't disadvantage small, resource-constrained organisations
If you're new to gender lens grantmaking:
1. Conduct a portfolio gender analysis — what proportion of your grantees are women-led? What's the average grant size by leadership gender?
2. Review one grant programme's criteria and process through a gender lens
3. Add gender to your outcome data request for existing grantees
If you want to deepen your practice:
1. Set a funded portfolio target — e.g., 50% of grants by value to women-led or gender-equity-focused organisations
2. Partner with Women's organisations in programme co-design
3. Publish a gender equity statement as part of your annual reporting
Tahua supports community trusts and foundations to build the data infrastructure for gender-lens grantmaking — including applicant demographics, assessment analytics, and portfolio reporting by grantee characteristics.