Gender Mainstreaming - Brief Description


In almost all traditional societies, women have less opportunities to develop their economic potential. They lack access to resources, which could empower them to improve their productivity, such as access to education, to jobs, to land, to credit and other opportunities. Gender mainstreaming is an organisational strategy to incorporate gender issues and gender awareness into all aspects of an institution’s policies and activities. This is done by assessing the impact of all activities on gender equity and gender equality. By this, efforts are not restricted to specific measures to help women, it is an integrative approach to adopt all policies and activities in order to achieve gender equity and equality by taking all possible effects and impacts on men and women into account. The objective is to establish a balanced distribution of responsibilities and opportunities between women and men.

Gender mainstreaming uses a number of different tools within this approach:


  • Gender divided statistics,
  • Benchmarking,
  • Resource mapping,
  • Gender impact analysis,
  • Gender division on access to resources,
  • Analysis of cultural values, norms and patterns of behavior.

Photo 1: Gender mainstreaming involves male and female people in a long-term process




