In the spotlight
Key2Europe 2019-2020
Handbook of gender mainstreaming practices in communications, HR and leadership A law, policy or programme can either reduce, maintain or increase gender inequalities between women and men. To help designing inclusive policies, the European Commission defined the Gender Impact Assessment (GIA) as follows: The Gender Impact Assessment is the estimation of the different effects (positive, negative or neutral) of any policy or activity implemented to specific items in terms of gender equality. This tool works in 2 steps. The first one is the analysis of the current gender-related position in relation to the policy under consideration; followed by the analysis of the projected impacts on women and men once the policy has been implemented. The final objective of the GIA is for users, that can also be the HR, to define the policy purposes, check its gender relevance, make a gender-sensitive analysis weighting the gender impact, and share findings and recommendations that could improve the inclusiveness of that policy.
Define
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Five main challenges of gender mainstreaming (by Lucille Griffon) First of all, there are often misunderstandings on the reason why gender mainstreaming exists and what it is about. Too often, gender mainstreaming is simply understood as a tool to assess the positions of men and women in our societies. Although it covers a part of what gender mainstreaming is, I believe that this vision fails to take into consideration power structures. We live in an unequal world where women are disproportionately being discriminated against, suffer from strong and entrenched inequalities. Thus, we cannot apply gender mainstreaming “all things being equal”,
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because all things are not equal. It is good to remember that the end goal remains women’s rights and gender equality. Gender mainstreaming should be a feminist tool. Secondly, gender mainstreaming can appear as a technical, “boring” tool, which does not allow for concrete, “here and now”, types of results. It is part of the nature of the tool and people should understand that if you do gender mainstreaming correctly, you will not see “results” per se - you simply avoid making mistakes from the start. Thirdly, gender mainstreaming has been thought of first as a public policy mechanism. As such, it is not always adequate for NGOs work for instance. Some work is needed there to provide concrete examples of gender mainstreaming’s implementation within organisations. Fourthly, there is a need for an intersectional gender mainstreaming method. However, it is difficult to find a meaningful way to build an intersectional GM tool which is neither tokenistic, nor a never-ending checklist. If an intersectional lens is not applied to gender mainstreaming, this approach risks to re-entrench gender norms. Assuming the different “needs” and positions of women and men in our societies, without digging deeper into their lived experiences, can stereotypically reinforce gender roles and confirm gender norms. Only by starting from an assessment of the real and complex identities of people of all genders, GM can become a tool of radical change. Finally, gender mainstreaming, as it resolutely questions the very basis of organisations’ work, requires long and sustained efforts. These efforts should be undertaken by dedicated individuals, who have both the financial and political means to conduct their work efficiently. Human, financial resources and political will are key.
