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Are We Making Progress?
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PARTNERS IN DEVELOPMENT Women are finding a place in various fields, and gender mainstreaming is helping them reach their goals and achieve their dreams
To reflect the changing environment of the region and new thinking about approaches to gender equality and women’s empowerment, the policy was replaced in 1998 by a new Policy on Gender and Development. This new policy adopted “gender mainstreaming” as a key strategy for addressing gender inequity and the empowerment of women.
So what does gender mainstreaming mean? Is it still about women? Is it about men and women? Is it WID just dressed up as GAD? Does it mean no special attention to women and girls? Does it mean specific projects and strategies to correct gender disparities and discrimination are no longer required? Does it mean that project designs no longer need to assess and correct differential access of women and men to services, resources, and decision making?
The answer to all is no—but it is not simple.
The shift from WID to GAD is often misinterpreted. Assumptions are made that gender mainstreaming means the disappearance of women with no specific attention required to deal with disadvantages confronting women and girls.
Too often gender mainstreaming leads to well-intentioned assumptions that women and men will benefit equally because there are no discriminatory provisions preventing women from participating. The result—gender mainstreaming—is everywhere but nowhere.
In November 2002, gender coordinators of multilateral institutions met in Norway as guests of the Norwegian Government to reflect on the question: Is gender mainstreaming a dead end? Many of us agreed there is confusion in the terminology of gender mainstreaming.
Put simply, gender mainstreaming is an approach to address gender inequalities and the empowerment of women. It does not dislodge women and girls as the central subject.
It recognizes that removal of gender discrimination and improvements in women’s economic, social, and political status require analysis of the social relations between women and men. Emphasis is placed on the need to understand how unequal relations might contribute to women’s exclusion from development—or generate and perpetuate gender inequalities.
Gender mainstreaming is about correcting gender disparities; it is about equal access to basic services and resources; it is about taking the views and perspectives of both women and men into account in setting the development agenda; it is about giving women a “voice” in decision making; it is about giving women and men control over their own lives; and it is about creating a more just society where no one is excluded and everyone can share equitably in the rewards of development.
ADB has traveled a long way in its journey from WID to GAD. Today ADB has four gender specialists in headquarters, three gender specialist national officers in resident missions (RMs), and five national long-term gender consultants in RMs—compared with only one WID specialist in 1986. ADB also has an external advisory group on gender and an institutional gender action plan (GAP) to deal with in-house gender issues.
Today more than 30% of ADB’s loan portfolio addresses gender equity objectives, compared with 15% in 1998—a 100% increase over the period.
Gender mainstreaming is being successfully integrated in all three core strategic areas of ADB operations—economic growth, social development, and governance—and in virtually all sectors that ADB supports, including agriculture, natural resource management, microfinance, rural and urban infrastructure development, governance, health, and education.
ADB’s recent lending activity confirms that gender is a crosscutting priority with broad relevance to ADB operations.
“Who would have thought that ADB road projects would include components to address issues such as trafficking of women and children and the spread of HIV/AIDS?"
This promising development reflects ADB’s growing recognition of gender impacts in infrastructure and hard sectors such as energy and transport. While these hard sectors present challenges in gender mainstreaming, more effort is being made to identify and address gender issues. For example, in 2002, for the first time, two infrastructure projects with gender themes were approved—the Rural Infrastructure Improvement Project and the Urban Governance and Infrastructure Project. Both are Bangladesh loan projects, developed with innovative features such as gender-sensitive design of physical facilities.
CHANGING
THE STATUS QUO
Projects today are providing infrastructure and facilities that
are improving the lives of women
Besides conventional project loans, recent program loans have included gender-inclusive reform measures, such as amendments to Nepal’s Civil Service Act to increase the proportion of women in the civil service and to address the sociocultural impediments to women’s career advancement.
The Pakistan Decentralization Support Program, which has gender and governance themes, includes a technical assistance loan for a Gender Reform Program to support the implementation of national and provincial gender reform action plans.
Gender equality and the empowerment of women are important goals in themselves, essential for broad-based development and poverty reduction. Attention to gender issues is sometimes viewed as interference with cultural norms and traditional ways of life, or as an imposition of “foreign” or “donor-driven” ideas. But “cultures” and “traditions” are never static.
They are constantly changing and adapting. Moreover, countries in the Asia and Pacific region have been committed for decades to improving the status of women—through international treaties and declarations, and through their own constitutions, laws, and national gender action plans.
As a development partner, ADB can play an important role in helping countries realize these commitments. ADB will continue to improve its approaches to gender issues to better support its member countries in pursuing their own gender equality goals.
Read more articles on gender and development issues in Asia and the Pacific
Find out more about Combating Trafficking of Women and Children in South Asia
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