Transcript Gender mainstreaming

Gender Mainstreaming:
an overview
Gender mainstreaming
• associated with the 1995 World Conference on
Women in Beijing and the Beijing Platform of
Action that signaled the UN’s first official use of
the term
• call for “gender mainstreaming” seems to have
been a culmination of two inter-related changes
in discourse prior to Beijing:
• Women in Development to gender and
development
• “integrating women” to “mainstreaming
gender”
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Gender mainstreaming
•
Women in Development to gender and development
• some improvements in women’s material conditions, but
little in their status
• women remained marginalized from “mainstream”
development, mainly due to how WID was implemented:
the establishment of women’s national machineries and
WID units and the emphasis on “women’s projects”
•
“integrating women” to “mainstreaming gender”
• relates to the second problem associated with WID, the
continued marginalization of women and women’s issues
• “mainstreaming” was seen as a way of promoting gender
equity in all of the “organization’s pursuits”
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
The purpose of gender mainstreaming
Gender mainstreaming is a strategy to get
development organizations to promote gender
equality
It is not an end in itself
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Definitions
…governments and other actors should promote
an active and visible policy of mainstreaming a
gender perspective in all policies and
programmes so that, before decisions are taken,
an analysis is made of the effects on women and
men, respectively. (Beijing, POA, 1995)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Definitions
the strategy/process of assessing the implications
for women and men of any planned action,
including legislation, making women’s as well as
men’s concerns and experiences an integral
dimension in the design, implementation,
monitoring and evaluation of policies and
programmes in all political, economic and social
spheres so that women and men benefit equally
and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate
goal is to achieve gender equality
(ECOSOC, 1997)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Definitions
• Taking account of gender equality concerns in
all policy, programme, administrative and
financial activities, and in organizational
procedures, thereby contributing to a profound
organizational transformation.
• Bringing the outcome of socio-economic and
policy analysis into all decision-making
processes of the organization, and tracking the
outcome. (UNDP, 2000)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Definitions
Gender mainstreaming is a process of ensuring that all of our
work, and the way we do it, contributes to gender equality by
transforming the balance of power between women and men.
The process involves:
• recognising the links between gender inequality and poverty
• assessing the different implications for women and men of our
development, humanitarian and advocacy work
• devising strategies and systems to ensure that the different
concerns, experiences and capacities of women and men
fundamentally shape the way we plan, implement and evaluate
all programme and advocacy work
• ensuring that Oxfam’s internal practices are consistent with the
above
Oxfam GB (2002)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Definitions
Mainstreaming has two mains aspects:
• Integration of gender equality concerns into
the analyses and formulation of all policies,
programmes and projects
• Initiatives to enable women as well as men to
formulate and express their views and
participate in decision-making across all
development issues (OECD-DAC, 1998)
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Integrationist or Agenda-setting?
• integrationist “builds gender issues within
existing development paradigms”
• agenda-setting “implies the transformation of
the existing development agenda with a
gender perspective.” (Jahan, 1995:13).
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Gender Mainstreaming: key “Elements”
• Policies and plans
• Leadership, Commitment and
Accountability
• Advocates
• Support mechanisms
• Organizational change
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Gender Policies
What is most noted is the nature of the policies
adopted and the quality or lack of implementation
also referred to as policy evaporation
But we have to remember some things about
“policy”:
• policies are political
• policies entail struggle
• good policies are unimplementable
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Leadership
Leadership is discussed in a least three respects:
• organizational
• management (i.e., lower level managers)
• change leadership (e.g., gender advocates)
But mostly in terms quantity (“more leadership”)
not quality
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Commitment
Commitment is also discussed in a number of
respects - leadership, management, staff.
Policies need to be translated into action and the
allocation of sufficient resources, human, as well
as financial is a common indicator of commitment.
but key questions are often left unanswered:
• What is being committed to?
• Who is accountable to who for commitments?
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Accountability
•
•
•
•
gender policies are perceived as optional due to their
invisibility, particularly, among senior and line
management
often, there is a lack of incentives to follow
organizational gender policies, systems and procedures
disincentives (e.g., sanctions) are often lacking and
where they exist seem to only harden those resistant
and encourage superficial changes
“accountability” often refers to being accountable
internally but rarely includes being accountable to
organizational supporters, such as donors, as well as
women who are supposed to benefit from the
organization
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Gender Mainstreaming Advocates
• usually refer to external organizations or
internal staff that take on the job of getting
“gender” on the agenda and keeping it there
• one of the most recurring elements and, for
some, the most critical
• we can speak of external advocates and
internal advocates
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
External advocates
• include women’s organizations and feminist
academics
• essential role in inspiring motivating and, in
some cases, forcing organizations to initiate a
gender mainstreaming process
• have played particularly catalytic and mobilizing
roles and taken up opportunities to raise the
awareness of, inspire and cajole governments,
donors and development agencies
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Internal advocates
• includes gender advisors, gender units and
gender focal points
• generally failed to live up to the expectations of
effecting change and have faced numerous
interrelated challenges: roles, responsibilities,
mandate and authority; structure and location;
and capacity and resources
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Gender advocates: roles, responsibilities,
mandate and authority
• roles and responsibilities seem to be either
ambiguous, at best, or include everything
concerning women
• fall under one or all of the following:
“advocacy”, “advisory”, policy “oversight” or
“monitoring”, or implementation (Goetz, 1995)
• spend much all their energies simply just to get
recognized as legitimate organizational actors
but rarely have the chance to transform the
organization
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Gender advocates: structure and location
The choice of structure and location are full of
contradictions and complications.
• structure refers to having specialized gender
units or advocates diffused throughout the
bureaucracy as well as their roles
• location refers to where advocates sit within
the organization structure
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Gender advocates: limited capacity and
resources
• lack of capacity can be seen from a number of
interrelated respects but all with a common
starting place: gender work is specialist work
requiring a range of skills as well as attitudes
and knowledge in order to undertake a variety
of often conflicting roles
• but often estimation of capacities and
resources required is NOT commensurate with
gender mainstreaming policies and plans,
which are often ambitious
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Common problems and responses
•
Lack of capacity resulting from lack of knowledge (“knowhow”) and supporting resources is often identified as a
barrier to gender mainstreaming
•
Also, there is a lack of
• understanding of the conceptual and practical links
between poverty reduction and gender equality
(including human rights)
• conceptual clarity about gender mainstreaming (e.g.,
it’s a goal or just about staff gender parity, or women’s
projects) as well as a lack of “know-how”
•
hence gender training, experience sharing and
tools/guidelines are most commonly recommended
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Support for Gender Mainstreaming
•
training efforts have been largely insufficient in terms of
scope and depth
•
recommendations for more tools, checklists and other
resources are common to address the common finding
that staff are underutilizing such resources.
•
also focus is often on staff to use what is already
available and focusing on how to make these resources
more accessible , e.g., publicizing them better
•
the fundamental issue of why they are not being used,
beyond the issue of time constraints is rarely addressed.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Gender and Organizational Change
• the third “shift”: from a focus on programmes
to the organizations themselves
• comes from a recognition that
• organizations themselves are gendered and,
in turn, produce gendered results
• only gender sensitive organizations can
undertake gender sensitive programmes
• gender and organizational change initiatives go
beyond introducing gender infrastructure (for
example, gender focal points) but requires
changes in organizational policies, procedures
and culture
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Approaches to assessing gender
mainstreaming
There are generally two approaches to how gender
mainstreaming has been assessed:
Positivist:
• assumes a linear relationship between policy, practice
and outcomes. Change is just a matter of implementing
“policy”
• failure of policy implementation is seen as “gaps” that
need to be filled
Radical:
• views relationship between policy, practice and outcomes
as political processes of contestation over power,
meaning and interpretation
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl
Gender mainstreaming: a failure?
• overall, gender mainstreaming has failed to
deliver on the promise the approach once had
• there are two schools of thought: gender
mainstreaming
• should be abandoned and the focus should
be on women’s rights and empowerment
• still valid but different strategies need to be
used
• both need to be pursued
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
www.kit.nl