Implementing Gender Equality: Gender Mainstreaming or the Gap between Theory and Practice

Abstract

Strategies to improve women’s participation in politics and to promote their full citizenship not only focus on the physical presence of women on the political scene, but also address the achievement of gender equality through public policies. Public policies can indeed help women to overcome barriers to their entry in the political sphere, but they are especially targeted at achieving gender equality in society at large. For a long time, gender equality policies were limited to ensuring equal treatment of both sexes in legislation. Later on, they developed into what are often called specific gender equality policies. While the former approach was meant to correct existing discrimination (in legislation) and to make citizens formally equal, the latter recognised that equal rights do not necessarily mean equal opportunities or even equal outcome, because of the structurally different starting positions individuals face in everyday life. Specific measures, such as positive action, were introduced to mitigate structural, though not legal, inequality and to promote equality (Nelen and Hondeghem, 2000). Since the fourth UN women’s conference held in Beijing in 1995, gender equality policies have increasingly been reoriented towards a broader and more structural approach of gender inequalities, with countries like the Netherlands being precursors in this field. Next to specific or targeted gender equality policies, other public policy areas are also meant to promote gender equality, not the least by recognising how previous and current policies contain biases (re)producing gender inequality and how these can be overcome. Gender mainstreaming is in sum meant to gender the mainstream public policies.

With special thanks to Theo Jans and to Anne Maria Holli for their very helpful comments and suggestions.