Understanding Gender Mainstreaming CSS

This post will help you to know about “Gender mainstreaming, its strategy, steps, tools and examples. How to do Gender mainstreaming and what are its benefits and different approaches to it?”

Understanding Gender Mainstreaming

Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment are the two major objectives of all feminist movements which can be achieved by undertaking a number of steps. One such step is Gender Mainstreaming. The concept is relatively new and came into being in 1995. Therefore it is necessary to first understand what is gender mainstreaming before going into detail.

What is Gender Mainstreaming?

The concept of Gender Manstreaming was first proposed in 1985 at the Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi but it was developed and properly adopted in 1995 at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing.

The concept of gender manstreaming mainly focused on making men’s and women’s experiences and choices an integral part of any policy making and its implementation process. The ultimate goal of gender manstreaming is to achieve gender equality in society.

Status Of Women’s And Gender Studies In Pakistan

Gender Mainstreaming Strategy

To implement the policy of gender manstreaming the strategy should be that men’s and women’s concerns and experiences should be made an integral part of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all social, political and economic spheres so that men and women benefit equally and inequality not perpetuated.

Gender Mainstreaming Tools

Gender mainstreaming is a lengthy process that can be achieved over the course of many years. Below are some of the gender mainstreaming tools that can be used to fast the process.

• Equal participation of both men and women in society
• Equal opportunities of progress to both men and women
• Equal inclusion of both men and women in decision making
• Elimination of reserve seats and quota system in public offices for women
• Merit base system

Steps Of Gender Mainstreaming

Some of the steps of gender manstreaming are given below.

• One of the major steps of gender manstreaming is to let women operated particularly in those areas which are male dominated.
• Similarly views and ideas of women co-workers should be heard and considered while making a decision. 
• While making a decision or implementing a policy gender specific data collection and is analysis is a must to ensure gender mainstreamng.
• Another step of gendr mainstreaming is to equally involve men and women in decision making
• And last but not the least, equal opportunity of access and utilization of services to both men and women.

Importance Of Gender Mainstreaming

Women cover almost half of the sky on the basis of world’s population. In such case their equal participation in society is not only necessary but it will also help in the elimination of many problems that we are facing today in modern world.

To understand the importance of gender mainstreaming read this article. 

Final Statement

Gender Manstreaming is a strategy and not an objective itself. It is a strategy for achieving the goal of gender equality. The followers of gender mainstreming believes that most of the policies are gender neutral while the societal structure in reality is not neutral due to which neutral policies are reinforcing gender division. Therefore all the policies should be gender specific to ensure gender equality in society.