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Gender mainstreaming is the public policy concept of assessing the different implications for people of different genders of any planned policy action, including legislation and programmes, in all areas and levels. Mainstreaming essentially offers a pluralistic approach that values the diversity among people of different genders.
The concept of gender mainstreaming was first proposed at the 1985 Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi, Kenya. The idea has been pushed in the United Nations development community. The idea was formally featured in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, and was cited in the document that resulted from the conference, the Beijing Platform for Action.
Definition
editMost definitions of gender mainstreaming conform to the UN Economic and Social Council formally defined concept:
- Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women's as well as men's concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.[1]
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.[2]
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.[2]
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 its ramifications.[2]
- ^ United Nations. "Report of the Economic and Social Council for 1997". A/52/3.18 September 1997.
- ^ a b c Shepard, Laura J. (2015). Gender Matters in Global Politics: A Feminist Introduction to International Relations. New York: Routledge.