What is gender mainstreaming?
Gender mainstreaming as a concept came into widespread use following the 1995 UN International Conference on Women. It is defined by the United Nations as “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 spheres”. The aim is to ensure that all mainstream policies take gender issues into account, ultimately culminating in gender equality. Through its promotion of gender mainstreaming as an invaluable guiding principle within the College, WiSER will advance one of its fundamental objectives; to stimulate institutional and cultural change in order to create a more gender-balanced, and ultimately more productive, environment.
If health care systems are to respond adequately to problems caused by gender inequality, it is not enough to simply “add in” a gender component late in a given project’s development. Research, interventions, health system reforms, health education, health outreach, and health policies and programmes must consider gender from the beginning. Gender is thus not something that can be consigned to “watchdogs” in a single office, since no one office can possibly involve itself in all phases of an organization’s activities. All health professionals must have knowledge and awareness of the ways in which gender affects health, so that they may address gender issues wherever appropriate thus rendering their work more effective. The process of creating this knowledge and awareness of – and responsibility for – gender among all health professionals is called “gender mainstreaming”.
