Research Analyst

The Istanbul Regional Hub (IRH) is UNDP’s main knowledge and advisory hub for the countries and territories serviced by UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Europe and CIS (RBEC). The Gender Equality Team at the UNDP IRH supports UNDP Country Offices in 19 countries and territories in the Europe and Central Asia region with a range of advisory services to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment. Specifically, the IRH Gender Equality Team works to deliver opportunities and improve skills for women’s economic empowerment, especially in the future world of work, focusing on the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) sectors; address and prevent violence and all forms of discrimination against women and girls; support women’s leadership and participation in decision-making processes; support Country Offices to close gender gaps and deliver gender equality results aligned with the SDGs as part of their national programmes.
The IRH Gender Equality Team also supports the design and implementation of regional and sub-regional initiatives to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment, and tracks and presents the results achieved by UNDP programmes and initiatives in the region in advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment. Among others, STEM4ALL is a regional digital platform launched by UNDP and UNICEF in 2021, which has catalyzed widespread interest in knowledge exchange, community building and cross-sector collaboration to overcome systematic gender barriers, break stereotypes, and access networks and resources to advance girls and women in STEM education and professional careers.
UNDP also recognizes the role women play in empowering other women as parliamentary representatives, strengthening the gender responsiveness of parliaments, and adopting gender-sensitive policy and legislative frameworks. In 2020, the UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub launched an interactive online platform, Equal Future. The platform allows users to actively observe the progress on women’s political participation in countries and territories in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region since the 1995 Beijing conference. In the spring of 2023, UNDP started a process to restructure the Equal Future platform. The new platform has been designed to expand its scope to cover aspects of women’s leadership and participation in politics and public administration, in collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh and #ShePersisted, and function as a one-stop shop with data, resources, and training and events, in addition to providing examples of good practices implemented by UNDP and other institutions in the region and beyond.
Duties and Responsibilities:
Under the direct supervision of the Team Leader, Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, at the UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub, the research analyst will undertake the following tasks:
Research, advocacy and communications: