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The aim of this paper is to consider approaches to understanding and evaluating accountability in education from the perspective of concerns with gender equality in education. This task has a number of facets and complexities, because ‘gender’ is not one simple set of relationships, and the notion of gender equality in education can be read in a number of different ways. Thus developing adequate conceptualizations for the key terms (accountability, and gender equality and education) needs to take account of gender as a particularly fluid, contextually located and contested idea signaling processes, which link with different formulations of policy and practice to enhance gender equality and accountability in education.

In this paper we look at a range of different meanings of accountability, distilled in the main GEM Report (UNESCO, 2017) and consider their implications in relation to debates about gender and gender equality in education. The aim of the paper is to develop a ‘bespoke’ interpretation of accountability and different forms of gender equality in education through which we can assess a number of research studies and country examples of forms of accountability.

This paper is also background paper prepared for the 2018 Global education monitoring report gender review: Meeting our commitments to gender equality in education.