Integrating Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Data into Judicial Systems

As Senior Policy Analyst at Costa Rica’s Judicial Branch, I led the design and implementation of a national strategy to incorporate sexual orientation and gender identity data into the institution’s service-delivery and decision-making systems, an initiative with no regional precedent in judicial institutions. I built an evidence-based policy analysis grounded in international access-to-justice literature and comparative legal frameworks, and structured a participatory co-design process bringing magistrates, technical staff, and LGBTQ+ advocacy groups to the same table to jointly define indicators, monitoring mechanisms, and implementation protocols.

The challenge unfolded in two stages. First, I needed to secure buy-in from a conservative senior leadership structure with no prior exposure to this type of policy. Rather than pursuing a top-down approach, I identified and cultivated internal champions across multiple judicial offices, forming a cross-institutional task force to present a joint institutional proposal that distributed ownership and reduced individual political exposure. The second challenge was persuading those same officials to co-design implementation protocols alongside LGBTQ+ advocacy organizations, which I addressed by building a formal partnership with Costa Rica’s Defensoría de los Habitantes, whose institutional credibility provided the legitimacy needed to bring both sides to the table.

Through facilitated workshops grounded in active listening and trust-building, we developed jointly validated protocols and indicators, culminating in a pilot program deployed across multiple Judicial Branch offices serving over 10,000 weekly users, along with a formally approved proposal for integration into the institution’s core data systems. You can find the full systematization of the pilot’s results linked on this page.

As part of the rollout, I also designed a training and awareness strategy on open data and gender diversity for judicial staff, sensitizing officials on why and how to collect this information respectfully. I contracted and supervised the external team that delivered it, and the course has since reached a large number of judicial officials across the institution.