Job Description – Senior Manager Gender
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Position
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Senior Manager Gender
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Location
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New Delhi with travel to program states
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Grade
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Sr Manager
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Reporting to
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Director Equity
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Nature
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Fixed Term Contract
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Kind of engagement
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Work from Office (onsite)
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Supervises
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Specialist Gender and Manager Gender
Functionally – State Specialist Gender
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About LLF
Language and Learning Foundation (www.languageandlearningfoundation.org) is a New Delhi-based non-profit organization with the vision of enhancing equitable student learning, with a focus on building strong foundational literacy and numeracy skills in their own language and additional languages. As a system-focused and impact-driven organization working on scale, LLF collaborates with state governments to develop and implement high-quality FLN programmes and builds commitment and capacity in the system to sustain them independently. Over the past 11 years, we have improved foundational learning outcomes of 1.4 million children and improved classroom processes of 250,000 teachers and 30,000 teacher educators across 8 states. LLF has been working with 14 languages for demonstrating a multilingual approach to foundational learning. LLF currently works with 7 state governments across the country.
About the programs:
Language and Learning Foundation (LLF) in its current strategic plan commits to continue to strengthen the system to deliver quality foundational learning for all children, build a community of high-quality teaching professionals equipped to effectively enable learning in diverse classrooms, build a strong instructional leadership at the mid-tier to drive foundational learning at scale and enable multilingual education (MLE) in foundational learning approaches and practices for public school systems Equity — in its fullest sense — is not a programme add-on at LLF. The organization is invested in building ecosystem capacity, generating evidence, and driving change. It implements and demonstrates innovative and equitable FLN models including early childhood education in schools, in high-need districts. By 2030, LLF commits to improving learning outcomes of 60 million children and reduce learning disparities in early childhood and primary grades, adopting a comprehensive FLN approach.
Position Summary
India's foundational learning crisis is not gender neutral. Girls from tribal communities, linguistic minorities, and economically marginalised households face compounding barriers — language-of-instruction mismatch, teacher beliefs shaped by gender and caste assumptions, domestic labour burdens that reduce learning time, and irregular school participation driven by migration and economic fragility. These barriers are structural, intersecting, and largely invisible in aggregate FLN data.
LLF has spent a decade building implementation-grounded insights into what equitable foundational learning requires. This role exists to deepen, systematise, and amplify the gender dimension of that equity work — translating it into programme design, teacher professional development, government policy influence, evidence generation, and external narrative. It is a strategic role and the person who holds it will shape how LLF understands and acts on gender across everything it does.
The Senior Manager - Gender will also provide strategic leadership in integrating gender perspectives into LLF’s organizational policies and frameworks. This role is pivotal in promoting gender equality, addressing disparities, and ensuring inclusive environments across LLF’s initiatives.
Roles and Responsibilities:
Strategic Leadership on Gender
- Lead the development and periodic refresh of LLF's gender strategy — ensuring it is grounded in field evidence, aligned with LLF's FLN theory of change, and actionable across all programme states
- Serve as LLF's internal thought leader on the intersection of gender, language, caste, and foundational learning — bringing a rigorous, implementation-grounded perspective to programme design, research, and policy work
- Advise senior leadership and programme teams on how gender equity considerations should shape LLF's priorities, partnerships, and resource allocation
- Represent LLF externally on gender and equity — at government platforms, funder convenings, research forums, and peer organisation networks
- Foster a gender-responsive organizational culture and governance framework. Lead and support capacity building workshops for LLF teams and other ecosystem players.
Programme Design and Integration
- Work with programme teams in Delhi and across all states to embed gender-responsive design into LLF's core interventions — CPD, district demonstration programmes, MLE, and Balvatika — ensuring they are designed to reach girls who are at risk of being left behind
- Oversee the development and quality assurance of practical tools and frameworks for gender-responsive FLN pedagogy — materials, classroom practices, and teacher training modules that address gender-differentiated learning needs and challenge deficit beliefs about girls' learning potential
- Support state teams in designing demonstration and scale gender-inclusive classroom practices to enhance learning outcomes for girls and marginalized groups.
- Support team in designing and oversee community engagement strategies that specifically address structural barriers to girls' participation
- Provide inputs in designing of flexible learning continuity approaches with a specific focus on girls from marginalized communities.
Teacher Professional Development — Belief and Practice
- Collaborate with the relevant teams in designing of a gender equity belief module within LLF's CPD architecture to translate changed beliefs into changed classroom practice
- Lead the development of teacher gender-responsiveness diagnostic — an observational tool that mentors and academic resource persons can use to identify and address gender-differentiated instructional patterns in classrooms
- Work with LLF's CPD team to ensure that gender-responsive pedagogy is threaded through all teacher development content embedded as a recurring lens across modules
Evidence, Research, and Learning
- Work with RMEL team in designing and oversee a gender-disaggregated evidence architecture for LLF's programmes — ensuring all assessment, monitoring, and evaluation work produces data disaggregated by gender, within all other categories of disaggregation as well.
- Lead or co-lead research on gender-specific dimensions of FLN in LLF's geographies
- Contribute to LLF's Teaching Learning Practices Survey and other field research tools — ensuring gender is a designed-in analytical category, not an afterthought
- Produce accessible knowledge products — policy briefs, field notes, case studies — that translate LLF's gender equity evidence into insights usable by governments, funders, and peer organisations
External Partnerships and Field Building
- Build and maintain partnerships with leading gender and education organisations — including research institutions, civil society networks, and UN agencies — to strengthen LLF's knowledge base and amplify its advocacy
- Working with peer organisations to adopt shared metrics for gender-equitable FLN progress
- Represent LLF's gender equity work in public communications to diverse audiences, from policymakers to community members
Programme management and coordination
- Own the end-to-end programme management of LLF's gender workstream — from annual planning and budgeting through to implementation oversight. Monitor expenditure against budget throughout the year and suggest alternate plans.
- Lead the preparation of high-quality programme reports, donor updates, and internal reviews for the gender workstream
- Contribute to fundraising and resource mobilisation for LLF's gender equity work
- Team leadership and people management by setting clear and meaningful performance expectations for each team member.
- Identify and support team members' professional development — identify learning opportunities, provide mentoring. Promote a positive culture of team work and build the team's collective capacity for reflective practice
Educational Qualifications, Skills and Experience
Educational Qualification:
- Master’s degree (or equivalent) in Economics, Sociology, Education, Anthropology, development studies; or any other related field;
- Specialization or certification in gender issues or gender mainstreaming preferred.
Skills:
- Strong leadership and strategic planning skills in gender equality and women’s empowerment.
- Experience in gender mainstreaming, gender analysis, and program development.
- Excellent communication, facilitation, and interpersonal skills.
- Proficiency in project management, including monitoring and evaluation.
Experience:
- 8–12 years of professional experience in gender and education, with significant experience in the Indian public education context — ideally in foundational learning, early childhood education, or primary education
- Deep understanding of the structural and intersecting barriers to girls' foundational learning in India — including language, caste, economic fragility, migration, and domestic labour — and demonstrated ability to translate that understanding into programme design and policy advocacy
- Experience designing and delivering gender-responsive teacher professional development — not just gender awareness training, but sustained professional learning that shifts instructional practice
- Strong research and analytical skills — ability to design gender-disaggregated evidence frameworks, interpret qualitative and quantitative data, and produce rigorous knowledge products for multiple audiences
- Demonstrated experience influencing government policy or programme design at state or national level — and the interpersonal and political skills to navigate government systems with credibility and patience
- Excellent written and spoken communication in English and Hindi — with the ability to translate complex equity arguments into compelling, accessible language
Desirable
- Knowledge of global frameworks on gender-responsive education, including UNGEI, the GPE Gender Equity Policy, and relevant SDG4 accountability mechanisms
- Experience producing position papers, policy briefs, or advocacy documents that have influenced institutional or government practice
Values:
- Embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion and respectful partnerships
- Integrity
- Dignity
Core Competencies:
- Achieving results
- Being accountable
- Ability to work collaboratively, lead and support team
- Analytical and strategic thinking
Functional Skill Set:
- Fluency with Google and MS Office Suite (Word, Excel, Outlook, Power point)
- Excellent writing skills
- Results-based program development and management
- Job knowledge and technical expertise
Languages: Fluency in English and Hindi is required.
LLF is an equal opportunity employer. We strongly encourage applications from women, candidates from marginalised communities, persons with disabilities and people with lived experience of the educational contexts in which we work.
What LLF Offers
In addition to a competitive remuneration, LLF offers
- An opportunity to work at the intersection of implementation, research, and policy — in one of India's most credible and government-embedded FLN organisations
- To work with a leadership team with deep field experience and genuine commitment to equity as an operational principle, not a narrative one
- Substantial autonomy to shape a new strategic function at a critical moment in LLF's growth
- Exposure to national and state policy processes, and to a growing network of global partners in FLN and gender-responsive education
- A culture of rigorous, reflective practice — where evidence is taken seriously, failure is learned from, and the hardest questions about who the system is and is not serving are asked and pursued