Gender Mainstreaming Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Gender mainstreaming has become the most common label used by academics and practitioners to describe any institutional strategy employed to incorporate gender issues into institutional practices, culture, and outcomes. As a result of its varying and widespread usage, however, there is no consensus or clarity about what gender mainstreaming is, what its potential is, or indeed whether efforts to implement gender mainstreaming have been a success or failure to date. There is more agreement as to a definition of gender mainstreaming. Emile Hafner-Burton and Mark Pollack (2002) cite the definition of gender mainstreaming used by the Council of Europe as the “(re)organization, improvement, development and evaluation of policy processes so a gender equality perspective is incorporated in all policies at all levels and all stages by key actors normally involved in policy-making” (p. 342).

Although gender mainstreaming first came to prominence at the Beijing Women’s Conference in 1995 when governments and other actors were exhorted to “promote an active and visible policy of mainstreaming a gender perspective in all policies and programmes,” its origins lie in the shift from the liberal “women in development” policies to “gender and development” policies among academics and development practitioners in the 1980s. Gender mainstreaming was identified as a mechanism that could help to ensure that development policies became more relevant to women. A decade after the Beijing conference, it had been widely adopted by international, regional, and national institutions such as the European Union, World Bank, United Nations Development Programme, and Inter-American Development Bank.

Various explanations account for the apparent ease with which gender mainstreaming has been adopted by a range of organizations. For example, Emile Hafner-Burton and Mark Pollack (2002) and Jacqui True (2003) include favorable political opportunity structures, the strength of women’s transnational networking, effective discursive framing, and the activities of gender policy entrepreneurs within institutions. However, there has been considerable debate among scholars such as Teresa Rees (1998) and Sylvia Walby (2005) about whether gender mainstreaming is integrationist, transformative, or agenda setting. Namely, does it simply introduce a gender perspective without challenging the existing policy paradigm and therefore can be promoted instrumentally on the basis that gender mainstreaming will enable other policy goals to be achieved more easily and efficiently? Or does gender mainstreaming result in more profound change—transforming and reorienting existing policy paradigms, prioritizing gender equality, and changing decision-making processes? Is it therefore a technocratic tool that makes claims to gender equality less radical, or an important feminist strategy that can make significant changes, or both simultaneously? Can gender mainstreaming be implemented by existing policy actors, or does it require more deliberative democratic processes? Or can it be implemented, as Walby, claims by a “velvet triangle” of academics, feminist bureaucrats, and organized women?

The overall assessment of gender mainstreaming’s potential and success as a strategy therefore varies tremendously, depending on whether analysts have an integrationist or agenda-setting/transformative view of it. Skeptics, often arguing from a transformative perspective, claim that it has allowed the mainstream to tame claims to equality, whereas others (often integrationists) believe that the implementation of gender mainstreaming has achieved significant improvements. But, when one analyzes the impact of gender mainstreaming, it is important to recognize that formally adopting gender mainstreaming as a strategy is not the same as implementing it. Increasingly, it is acknowledged that it is necessary to evaluate what has happened in practice. In 2005 Caroline Moser provided a framework of three categories with which to evaluate gender mainstreaming: It can evaporate (when positive policy intentions are not followed through in practice), it can become invisible (when what happens on the ground is not captured by monitoring and evaluation procedures), and it can be resisted (essentially, when political opposition creates mechanisms that block gender mainstreaming). Her study of international organizations finds that although there has been significant rhetorical change—because much has been achieved in the initial stages of adopting the terminology and creating the policies—the subsequent stages of implementation and evaluation have been more circumscribed, and the impact of gender mainstreaming is often less than had been anticipated. Different institutions and policy domains also vary considerably in the implementation and outcomes of their gender mainstreaming strategies. From the research that has been done to date, the different political opportunity structures, ways that issues are framed, and roles of actors inside and outside the institutions all affect whether gender mainstreaming is adopted and what happens to it in practice.

Bibliography:

Hafner-Burton, Emile M., and Mark A. Pollack. “Mainstreaming Gender in Global Governance.” European Journal of International Relations 8, no. 3 (2002): 339–373.
Moser, Caroline. “Has Gender Mainstreaming Failed?” International Feminist Journal of Politics 7, no. 4 (2005): 576–590.
Rees,Teresa. Mainstreaming Equality in the European Union. New York: Routledge, 1998.
True, Jacqui. “Mainstreaming Gender in Global Public Policy.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 5, no. 3 (2003): 368–396.
Walby, Sylvia. “Gender Mainstreaming: Productive Tensions in Theory and Practice.” Social Politics (Fall 2005): 321–343.

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