Gender Mainstreaming : The Way Ahead
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Posted On :
Aug-30-2011
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Article Word Count :
791
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With an eye on gender equality, gender mainstreaming strives for a process of assessing the implications for the women and men alike,in every area and every field.
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Gender mainstreaming is defined as a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of...the policies and programs in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated.' According to the United Nations, gender mainstreaming is "not an end in itself but a strategy, an approach, a means to achieve the goal of gender equality. Mainstreaming involves ensuring that gender perspectives and attention to the goal of gender equality are central to all development activities."
In a country of nearly 1.2 billion people, women make up 48.26% of India's population and constitute 44.2% of voters in national elections. In order to ensure that women enjoy their right to political equality, we must enhance their capacity to contest elections, reduce barriers to political participation and introduce new affirmative steps such as the proposed 33% Reservation of Seats for Women in Parliament Bill to enhance the participation of women in state and national administration.
The priorities of the gender mainstreaming remains to actively work, to mainstream gender across various sectors and activities, synergizing gender in education, helping the corporate sector to integrate gender in corporate decision-making, capacity building for improved governance in Panchayati Raj institutions, guiding NGOs toward fully mainstreaming gender in development work and sensitizing law enforcement agencies about gender issues.
The relative status of men and women; the interaction between gender and race, class and ethnicity and questions of rights, control, ownership, power and voice all have a critical impact on the success and sustainability of every development intervention. In practice, gender mainstreaming means identifying gaps in gender equality.
Gender is socially constructed roles ascribed to males and females. These roles, as learnt, change over time and vary widely within and between cultures. Gender is also a socially constructed definition of the relationship between the sexes and contains an unequal power relationship with male domination and female subordination in most spheres of life. Men and the tasks, roles, functions and values attributed to them are valued higher than women and what is associated with them. It is increasingly recognized that society is characterized by male bias: the male norm is taken as the norm for the society as a whole, which is reflected in policies and structures, and that such gender inequality is widely prevalent in many societies. It often happens that gender inequality is unintentionally reproduced through policies and structures. As a strategy to attain gender equality, therefore, mainstreaming of gender perspectives in policies and structures was proposed.
Gender equality has both quantitative and qualitative aspects. The quantitative aspect implies an equal distribution of women and men in all areas of the society, such as education, work, recreation, and position of power. The qualitative aspect implies that the knowledge, experiences and values of both women and men are given equal weight and used to enrich and direct all social areas and endeavors. The ultimate goal of gender mainstreaming in simple term is the achievement of gender equality women’s movements in India are unfamiliar with the tools and frameworks of macroeconomic analysis. State actors are often trapped within patriarchal perspectives with the growing body of work by feminist economists remaining marginal to mainstream policy-making. Creative and strategic collaborations between these diverse groups can strengthen the alternative discipline of “socio-economics”.
An emerging partnership between State and civil society actors around the issue of gender budgeting, a partnership through which they address the challenge of bringing macroeconomic policy within the realm of public debate, gives cause for hope.
Few recommendations for an equal plying field for both men and women are:-
• A proportion of the community budget for the main project activities to be
earmarked for women’s organizations to plan and implement.
• Separate women only groups for execution of key (mainstream) portions of the
project.
• To move up the scale from Self Help Groups (SHGs) for micro finance to non- bank financial intermediary; to move to larger scale credit schemes and up the technological ladder (for example, into long-distance marketing).
• Women’s ownership of productive assets – land, trees, water bodies, housing,
fishponds and so on.
• Sharing and social provision of childcare and domestic work.
Working with individual projects the gender mainstreaming concerns can then be translated into detailed, local interventions. These suggested interventions, in order to lead to gender mainstreaming, need to be put into the project implementation procedures through writing in official documents, such as in the aides-memoire of supervision mission reports. This is a critical step for gender mainstreaming because, unless put in an official documents followed by efforts to implement them, gender studies and suggestions remain mere pieces of paper.
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Article Source :
http://www.articleseen.com/Article_Gender Mainstreaming : The Way Ahead_78091.aspx
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Author Resource :
Gender mainstreaming and adult education are the beads of a common necklace wreathed to make the society a better place to survive for the best creation of the god,The human beings.
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Keywords :
gender mainstreaming, adult education,
Category :
Society
:
Society
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