Gender mainstreaming: What does it mean and should we continue doing it?
Posted 11:58 PM by Internal Voices in Labels: 7th edition
Viivi Erkkilä, intern at UNRIC, Nordic desk in Brussels
Gender mainstreaming is an approach the United Nations is committed to incorporate into all its policies and programmes in order to promote gender equality at all levels of the society. It is also one of cross-cutting themes of the Millennium Development Goals. Gender mainstreaming is so widely discussed that one could argue it has become the global strategy of the millennium. But what does the term mean and has the approach led to any changes? Are gender questions actually considered in all actions at all levels of society? Or has gender mainstreaming as a global strategy made gender questions such a broad issue that it has become a mantra with no relation to reality?
Gender mainstreaming is broadly defined as a global strategy aimed at achieving gender equality by ensuring that gender perspectives are brought to the centre of all activities from policy development, research, legislation and resource allocation to the planning, implementation and monitoring of programmes and projects. It is a strategy for making both women’s and men’s concerns and experiences an integral part of all dimensions of policies and programmes, so that women and men benefit equally from them. Mainstreaming is, therefore, not a goal, but a process for achieving gender equality in society. The approach originates from the objective to bring gender into the mainstream of development activities.
The gender mainstreaming approach developed in the 1980s as a counter reaction to the Women in Development (WID) approach, which tried in the 1970s to empower women to become the driving force of development. The idea was to move the focus more onto men and gender instead of the power imbalances between men and women. The WID approach operated on the assumption that women were a marginalised group, which was in most situations more disadvantaged and had special interests concerning development work. Male interests continued to be viewed as the norm. The gender mainstreaming approach aims at putting more emphasis on research and acknowledges that men and women respond differently to development actions. Mainstreaming is, thus, not about adding a ‘women’s component’ or even a ‘gender equality component’ to existing policy, but it tries to incorporate a more balanced view on how different development policies affect women and men.
Officially the term gender mainstreaming was first established at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. It is defined in the UN framework as a major global strategy for the promotion of gender equality in the Beijing Platform for Action: The ECOSOC Agreed Conclusions (1997/2) established the important overall principles for gender mainstreaming two years after the Beijing conference. The UN has also developed clear intergovernmental mandates for gender mainstreaming for all the major areas of its work, including, for example, disarmament, poverty reduction and health. Furthermore, in 2000, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, which calls for the integration of women into all conflict resolution processes and post-conflict reconstruction.
Despite the significant popularity of gender mainstreaming, the approach has received a fair amount of criticism. A major part of the critics argue that rather than transforming forms of development, gender mainstreaming has transformed the term ‘gender.’ In fact, it has in many ways de-politicised the concept of gender and made it no-one’s issue. Gender is no longer a specific women’s issue or even a question of equal rights, it is merely an add-on term in development policy documents. Critics have also argued that the ideals of equality, development and peace, summed up by international women’s movements in the UN International Women’s Year Conference in 1975, have been distorted by integrating a gender component into pre-existing mandates and procedures of development organizations.
Furthermore, gender mainstreaming has often been seen more as a goal rather than as a process. Taking gender implications into account in all policies and programmes is also a wide and diverse challenge for development actors, who far too often lack the time and resources to conduct in-depth and systematic gender analysis. In addition, there has been lack of understanding among development actors on what gender mainstreaming actually means, and gender questions have been often classified as a special women’s issue rather than a question of equal rights. It is also important to acknowledge other social and cultural factors that affect people’s identities and the relationships between men and women. All women and men are not equal in relation to each other. Social class, for example, can play a far greater role than gender in defining the different positions people have in society.
Was the integration of gender mainstreaming into all aspects of development a mistake? The most critical researchers argue that the misunderstandings and lack of time have actually resulted in forgetting gender implications of development policies and especially the needs of women. However, more moderate researchers consider that gender mainstreaming is the only possible strategy to keep women’s issues and gender equality on the agenda, and to slowly integrate them into all policies and programmes as the approach aims to do. The main disadvantage of gender mainstreaming has probably been that the strategy was expected to deliver major results in a very short period of time. When this did not happen, many were disappointed. Gender mainstreaming seems to have experienced some form of inflation in its popularity and the concept has been used too loosely without understanding what the strategy is about. As critics of the approach argue, gender has become everyone’s issue, but at the same time no-one’s issue.
Nevertheless, gender mainstreaming is a useful strategy, which can be used to transform the unequal structures that still prevail in the world. It should not be disregarded just because results were not achieved quickly enough. And like all development strategies, more resources, informed personnel, planning and evaluation of programmes are needed to ensure long-term success; it is unrealistic to expect changes over night. Transformation of the imbalances of power should start from a gender analysis of inequalities between women and men, with its links to race and class, to create a more context-specific understanding of inequalities. If development organisations carry out gender analysis in this way, new priorities should emerge naturally. Realising and understanding gender implications is the key to achieving gender equality between not only men and women, but also between women and men of different social statuses. Limitations in a strategy should not stop us from working for a better world for all of us, “without distinctions to race, sex, language or religion.” ■
References
- Fourth World Conference on Women: Platform for Action. DAW (1995)
- Gender Mainstreaming: Strategy for Promoting Gender Equality. OSAGI fact sheet (2001).
- Gender Mainstreaming: An Overview. New York: OSAGI (2002).
- Neimanis, Astrida. Gender Mainstreaming In Practice: A Handbook. UNDP RBEC (2001).
- Parpart, Jane. “Lessons from the Field: rethinking empowerment, gender and development from a post- (post?)-development perspective,” pp. 41-56 in K. Saunders, ed., Feminist Post-development Thought: rethinking modernity, post-colonialism and representation. London: Zed Books (2002).
- Hilkka Pietilä, The Unfinished Story of Women and the United Nations, (2007).
- Porter, Fenella and Sweetman, Caroline (ed.). Mainstreaming Gender in Development: A Critical Review. Oxfam Publishing (2005).
- ECOSOC Agreed Conclusions 1997/2 (1997).
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