3
Gender mainstreaming in international institutions
Gender mainstreaming has been discussed as a strategy to achieve gender equality in certain
domestic arenas, at least since the 1980s (see Burton on Australia 1991) when it was also
gainising attention internationally through the women and development field. It came to the fore
in the international arena in a major way at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in
Beijing. At this conference, it was agreed that the Beijing Platform for Action would focus on
gender mainstreaming as a major strategy for the promotion of gender equality in all areas of
concern including inter alia poverty, health, political decision-making and, importantly for this
paper, armed conflict. The Platform established that ‘gender analysis should be undertaken on
the situation and contributions of women as well as men in all areas for actions are planned, such
as the development of policies or programmes’ (Hannan 2004). The UN formalised its
commitment to a gender mainstreaming strategy in 1997 when the Economic and Social Council
(ECOSOC) called on all agencies to adopt this approach to gender equality. It defined gender
mainstreaming 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
political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and
inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality (in Hannan
2004).
Gender mainstreaming is simply, as Bacchi and Eveline state ‘a commitment to guarantee that
every part of an organisation assumes responsibility to ensure that policies impact evenly on
women and men’ while gender analysis is ‘a tool for vetting policies to ensure that they pay due
heed to the differential location and experiences of women and men’ (2003: 98). It is not
Convention