Facilitating an NHRI Gender Audit Step 1: Identify focus group and participants Identifying the number and nature of focus groups you need to facilitate will depend on several factors: • Size of your NHRI: the bigger your NHRI, the more focus groups • Geographical spread of your NHRI: if you have regional offices, hold focus groups in at least some, if not all, of the offices • Issues that have been highlighted: organise focus groups around specific issues you want to follow up from the document review and survey results • Gaps in the information gathered to date: organise focus groups around questions that haven’t yet been answered adequately • Who you think can provide the best information: canvass all perspectives and experiences (e.g. from diverse gender groups, divisions or functions in your NHRI, levels of seniority within the NHRI, external stakeholders etc.) • What is most conducive to free discussion: it is good practice to group together participants with similar characteristics so discussion can flow freely and can deepen. Use your common sense to decide what will work for the time you have and the size of your NHRI (e.g. female staff, male staff, senior leaders, regional staff, division staff). • Practicalities of resources, budget and time: focus groups take time to arrange, facilitate and analyse the information from (note your inputs in Tool 3) There is no rule about the number of focus groups you facilitate or whether to run more than one session with each group. Be practical and hold enough focus groups to get the information you need to answer your audit questions. Step 2: Plan focus group number and composition Once you know the makeup of your focus groups, decide how you will invite them to take part. You can invite individual participants directly or seek nomination through key people. Focus groups work well with between six and ten participants. You may find, particularly in a small office, that one person meets several focus group categories, such as a female staff member AND senior leader AND communications division. If this is the case, use your better judgement about when it would be useful for them to participate, remembering that each focus group will have a slightly different emphasis. A focus group typically lasts for one to two hours but this will depend on how engaged your participants are. This is dependent upon the ability of your facilitators to ensure everyone participates and feels their views are valued. Figs 23 is an example of a focus group schedule for a large NHRI spread over several regions and Fig 24 for a smaller NHRI that works from one office. Note: these are examples only and you may prefer different group compositions that suit your audit areas, questions and NHRI context. 55