Gender mainstreaming
Gender mainstreaming is the public policy concept of assessing the implications for people of different genders of a planned policy action, including legislation and programmes.
The concept of gender mainstreaming was first proposed at the 1985 Third World Conference on Women and has subsequently been pushed in the United Nations development community. The idea was formally featured in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women, and was cited in the document that resulted from the conference, the Beijing Platform for Action.
Definition
Most definitions of gender mainstreaming conform to the UN Economic and Social Council formally defined concept:There are different approaches to gender mainstreaming:
Institutional perspective: The ways in which specific organizations adopt and implement mainstreaming policies. This will often involve an analysis of how national politics intersects with international norms and practices.
Discursive ''perspective: Queries the ways in which mainstreaming reproduces power relations through language and issue-framing. This approach will often involve looking at documents, resolutions and peace agreements to see how they reproduce the narratives of gender in a political context.
These approaches are not necessarily competing, and can be seen as complementary.
The ways in which approaches are used, however, can also reflect differing feminist theories. For example, liberal feminism is strongly invoked by mainstreaming through the binary approach of gender in strict relation to the public sphere of policymaking. Poststructuralist feminism'' can be seen in mainstreaming thought which seeks to displace gender difference as the sole axis of difference and to highlight the diversity of policy and its ramifications.
Principles
Prioritizing gender equality
Gender mainstreaming tries, among others, to ascertain a gender equality perspective across all policy areas. According to Jacqui True, a Professor of politics and international relations, "very policy or piece of legislation should be evaluated from the perspective of whether or not it reduces or increases gender inequalities." This concept of gender equality is not limited to formal equality, it includes as well equality de facto, which is a more holistic approach to gender policy in order to tackle the interconnected causes that create an unequal relation between the sexes in all areas of life.Lombardo notes that "here should be evidence that gender equality objective and policies of special concern for women have been prioritized in the organization among competing objectives."
Incorporating gender into politics and decision making
Puechguirbal takes a discursive approach to argue that in order to successfully mainstream a gendered perspective in politics, language needs to be reevaluated and used to change the parameters of how women are perceived.Historically, documents concerning international agreements, peacekeeping arrangements and legal resolutions have perpetuated stereotypes that disempower women. This can be seen through the use of language, even as simply as in the UN Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration program's motto: 'One man, on weapon'.
Reference of gender issues should be found in all policy areas. "There must be evidence that the mainstream political agenda has been reoriented by rethinking and rearticulating policy ends and means from a gender perspective," Lombardo says, referencing Rounaq Jahan, a political scientists, feminist leader and author. As the Beijing Platform for Action states, "women's equal participation in political life plays a pivotal role in the general process of the advancement of women."
Further, according to the Beijing Platform for Action "ithout the active participation of women and the incorporation of women's perspective at all levels of decision-making, the goals of equality, development and peace cannot be achieved." Therefore, Lombardo claims that women and men should be equally represented in any decision-making institution. Charlesworth agrees and believes that every effort should be made to broaden women's participation at all levels of decision-making.
Post-conflict peace-building (PCPB)
An area of policy and decision making that will particularly benefit from gender mainstreaming is post-conflict peace-building, also known as PCPB. Various feminist research has concluded that men and women experience violent conflict differently and moreover, the current policies surrounding PCPB are insufficient in addressing the disadvantaged position of women in male-dominated power structures that are further reinforced by peace-building efforts, both from the domestic and international communities. Gender mainstreaming in PCPB would emphasize the importance of gendered considerations of particular issues that disproportionally affect women in post-conflict settings. This would mean that policy reflected an acknowledgment of the many instances of wartime sexualized violence perpetrated on women, among other issues that women face during conflict. A major focus of the effort towards gender mainstreaming in post-conflict peace-building policy is to lessen the international community's inclination towards building a return to 'normal' for the post-conflict region. Much of feminist research has found that returning to 'normal' is of little comfort for women, who were burdened by the patriarchal systems that were in place before conflict broke out. As Handrahan notes, the international community involved in much of PCPB "tolerates high levels of violence against women in their own societies." Policy that prioritized gender in its applications and goals would seek to build a society where women are better off than they were before conflict broke out.Shifts in institutional culture
Gender mainstreaming can be seen as a process of organizational change. Gender mainstreaming must be institutionalized through concrete steps, mechanisms, and processes in all parts of the organization. According to Lombardo, this change involves three aspects: policy process, policy mechanisms; and policy actors. She explains as follows:"1. A shift in policy process means that the process "is reorganized so that ordinary actors know how to incorporate a gender perspective" or that gender expertise is included "as normal requirement for policy-makers".
2. A shift in policy mechanism involves the adoption of horizontal cooperation on gender issues across all policy areas, levels, and departments; and the use of appropriate policy tools and techniques to integrate the gender variable in all policies and to monitor and evaluate all policies from a gender perspective.
3. The range of policy actors participating in the policy-making process is broadened to include, apart from policy-makers and civil servants, gender experts and civil society."
Gender budgeting
Gender budgeting encompasses activities and initiatives aiming at the preparation of budgets or the analysis of policies and budgets from a gender perspective. It can also be referred to as gender-sensitive budgeting or gender-responsive budgeting. Gender budgeting does not aim at creating separate budgets for women, or only increasing spending on women’s programmes. It is rather concerned with addressing budgetary gender inequality concerns, as for instance, how gender hierarchies influence budgets, and gender-based unpaid or low paid work.Examples
As Jacqui True says, "ainstreaming was established as a global strategy for achieving gender equality, and in turn for achieving sustainable economic development in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action ratified by all United Nations member states. It is now incumbent upon nation-states and international organizations to carry out gender mainstreaming. As such, mainstreaming has achieved widespread endorsement by individual governments, regional supra-state bodies." What follows is a non-exhaustive list of examples of these endorsements.Nicaragua
in Nicaragua brought to office the first female president in the Americas. On April 25, 1990, Violeta Chamorro became the first and only woman to defeat a male incumbent presentment. This helped to change and mobilize mainstream gender structure within Nicaragua. In 1993 the existing outdated Sandinista Women's organization, the Nicaraguan Institute for Research on Women, was revitalized and renamed by the Chamorro government as the Nicaraguan Institute for Woman. This was to encourage the involvement of Nicaraguan women in the country's economic, social, cultural, and political development and to promote a change in mainstream gender constructs. More specifically, the INIM aims to institute in all sectors a system of gender-focus indicators and to achieve equal opportunity in all State body programming. In 1994, the INIM with 62 women's groups held discussions to mobilize their initiatives and form a bill of action. The discussions formed a plan, which defined patriarchy, sexism, and gender stereotypes to reduce inequality in education, employment, and violence.Although the Nicaraguan Institute for Women claimed to "have been instrumental in mainstreaming gender equality principles and strategies into agriculture, socio-economic development, higher education, and sexual and domestic violence prevention," the United Nations General Assembly on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in 2007 raised several concerns, such as the backlog of important women's rights legislation in the country, the lack of studies on abortion, and the available funds of the Institute.
Taiwan
Under the influence of the UN community, the usage of the term increased in Taiwan since 2000. Local feminist organizations have different views on gender mainstreaming. Some groups considered that the Commission on Women Rights Promotion under Executive Yuan should be expanded, while other groups, including the National Alliance of Taiwan Women's Associations, considered that gender mainstreaming is not promotion of women's rights but an assessment of all policies and requires a specific organization.Foundation of Women's Rights Promotion and Development has conducted research on gender mainstreaming and gender equality development, produced gender resources kits for training and education, networked women groups and entrepreneurs, participated in international exchange in UN, APEC gender related meetings.