Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women

Making it happen
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Wmen’s
organizations
are key agents
in bringing about
institutional
transformation
done by different groups of professionals in the units of government or international
agencies that set policies and allocate resources.
An unfortunate consequence of training a broad range of professionals is
the elimination or downgrading of specialized gender units and professionals.
Because mainstreaming requires a shift of responsibility for promoting gender
equality to all personnel, especially managers, gender specialists are considered
redundant. In fact, the reverse is true: the need for specialist support often
increases with gender mainstreaming. A former gender equality director in
Canada offered the following metaphor to counteract the argument that since
her agency had mainstreamed gender equality it needed fewer gender advisors:
We need to liken the need for gender equality expertise to the need
for technical expertise in information technology. Twenty years ago, every
department in our organization might have one computer for 20 people.
At that time, there would be one technical person for the whole organization
that would attend to any computer glitches. Now, twenty years later,
everyone has a computer on their desks. Computers have been “mainstreamed.”
Does that mean we no longer need the one or two technical
people who were there before? Just the opposite! We now need technical
departments with different types of expertise. We need those who can
attend to immediate problems and those who are doing the long-range,
strategic thinking about the path that technology will take and what
kinds of skills and policies the organization will need to maximize use.
So it should be for gender equality expertise (Rivington 2004).
Institutional structures and processes
Institutional transformation—fundamental change in the rules that specify how
resources are allocated and how tasks, responsibilities, and values are assigned
in society—is the third ingredient essential for achieving gender equality and
women’s empowerment on a large scale (Kabeer and Subrahmanian 1996;
Kelleher 2002). Women’s organizations are key agents in bringing about institutional
transformation nationally and internationally because they articulate
women’s priorities and organize and advocate for change. In India women’s
organizations transformed political institutions at the local level, successfully
lobbying for two constitutional amendments in 1992 that required that at least
a third of the seats in panchayats (local governing councils) be reserved for
women. In Brazil civil society networks led the transformation of state and
municipal health institutions to prioritize cervical cancer prevention, establish
abortion services, and implement other aspects of the International Conference
of Population and Development’s Programme of Action.
At the international level global and regional women’s movements actively
mobilized throughout the 1990s to put gender equality and women’s empowerment
on the agendas of major UN conferences, transforming international