Gender Mainstreaming

WHAT IS GENDER MAINSTREAMING?

Gender Mainstreaming or Gender and Development (GAD)
mainstreaming is the major global strategy for ensuring that
the government pursues gender equality in all aspects of
the development process to achieve the vision of a gender-
responsive society where women and men equally
contribute to and benefit from development. Its importance
has been extensively discussed since governments
committed to this concept in the Beijing Platform for Action
during the Fourth United Nations World Conference on
Women in 1995.

WHAT IS THE MAINSTREAM?

The “mainstream” is an inter-related set of dominant ideas,
values, practices, institutions and organizations that
determine “who gets what” within a society. The ideas and
practices with the mainstream tend to reflect and reinforce
each other and thus provide a rationale for any given
allocation of societal resources and opportunities.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
Gender mainstreaming ensures that policy-making and
legislative work is of higher quality and has a greater
relevance for society, because it makes policies respond
more effectively to the needs of all citizens – women and
men, girls and boys. Gender mainstreaming makes public
interventions more effective and ensures that inequalities
are not perpetuated.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

A political commitment for gender equality and a
compatible legal framework are the basic conditions for the
development of a successful gender mainstreaming strategy.
Such plan should take into account the context, satisfy the
necessary conditions, cover all the relevant dimensions,
foresee the use of concrete methods and tools, set out the
responsibilities and make sure that the necessary
competences exist to achieve the anticipated results within
a planned time frame.