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Monroe County Women’s Commission offers gender‑equity rubric after testing 2024 personnel change
Summary
The county Women’s Commission presented a gender‑equity rubric March 12 and recommended publishing it and related guidelines; a test run on a 2024 paid family‑leave amendment found the ordinance largely gender‑neutral or unequal under the rubric’s criteria.
Julie Hardesty, a member of the Monroe County Women’s Commission, presented a gender‑equity rubric the commission developed to evaluate county policies and ordinances and recommended the board approve public posting of the rubric and guidance documents.
Hardesty said the rubric grew from work beginning in 2023 to assess women and marginalized genders’ needs in planning for a new county jail and that the tool can be used more broadly to evaluate county ordinances. She said the commission used five WHO‑informed levels of gender responsiveness and adapted categories from the Women’s Democracy Network and a University of Arkansas equity lens. ‘‘I did not find that this ordinance rated very highly for gender equity,’’ Hardesty said of a 2024 personnel policy amendment for paid parental and family leave that she tested as a pilot.
The presentation noted practical next steps: the commission offered a spreadsheet and scoring guidelines and asked the commissioners’ permission to publish the rubric so departments and the public can apply it during policy development. Commissioners thanked the panel and said they would check the county website’s availability of the referenced 2024 ordinance.
Why it matters: The rubric is framed as a tool to increase transparency and to surface needs—such as pregnancy care, child‑care supports and re‑entry services—that often are missing from policy language. Hardesty said online sources used to create the rubric are now largely archived and that making the rubric available could improve future ordinance drafting and review.
Provenance: Presentation began with the Women’s Commission update and ran through the commission’s summary and commissioner acknowledgements during the department updates portion of the meeting.
