Glossary

The empowerment of women and girls concerns their gaining power and control over their own lives. It involves awareness-raising, building self-confidence, expansion of choices, increased access to and control over resources, and actions to transform the structures and institutions that reinforce and perpetuate gender discrimination and inequality. This implies that to be empowered they must not only have equal capabilities (such as education and health) and equal access to resources and opportunities (such as land and employment), but they must also have the agency to use these rights, capabilities, resources, and opportunities to make strategic choices and decisions (such as is provided through leadership opportunities and participation in political institutions).

In addition, UNESCO explains, “No one can empower another: only the individual can empower herself or himself to make choices or to speak out. However, institutions including international cooperation agencies can support processes that can nurture self-empowerment of individuals or groups”.

Inputs to promote the empowerment of women should facilitate women’s articulation of their needs and priorities and a more active role in promoting these interests and needs. Empowerment of women cannot be achieved in a vacuum; men must be brought along in the process of change. Empowerment should not be seen as a zero-sum game where gains for women automatically imply losses for men. In empowerment strategies, increasing women’s power does not refer to “power over” or controlling forms of power, but instead to alternative forms of power—“power to,” “power with,” and “power from within”—that emphasize the use of individual and collective strengths to achieve common goals without coercion or domination.

Gender refers to sociocultural norms, identities, and relations that: 1) structure societies and organizations; and 2) shape behaviors, products, technologies, environments, and knowledge (Schiebinger, 1999). Gender attitudes and behaviors are complex and change across time and place. Importantly, gender is multidimensional (Hyde et al., 2018; Dubois et al., 2025) and intersects with other social categories, such as sex, age, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation and ethnicity (see intersectionality. Gender is distinct from sex (Fausto-Sterling, 2012). Historically, gender definitions have been based on a binary concept – women and men. In most key UN definitions, this binary framework continues to dominate, including in chemical policy. To avoid exclusions, newer definitions and guidelines often additionally use the term “all genders”. Beyond defining gender, applying a binary concept within the difference approach to Gender Mainstreaming remains valuable, productive and necessary, as it allows for comparing the experiences of women and men. Analyzing these differences and using binary-disaggregated data provides insights into social structures and inequalities. While we often work with binary categories for analytical purposes (also in chemicals management), we want to do so with a clear awareness of their limitations and with the aim of building more inclusive approaches in the future.

Gender (or sexual) division of labor: This is an important concept in basic gender analysis that helps deepen understanding about social relations as an entry point to sustainable change through development. The division of labor refers to the way each society divides work among men and women, boys and girls, according to socially established gender roles or what is considered suitable and valuable for each sex. Within the division of labor, there are several types of roles:

Productive roles: Activities carried out by men and women in order to produce goods and services either for sale, exchange, or to meet the subsistence needs of the family.
Reproductive roles: Activities needed to ensure the reproduction of society’s labor force. This includes housework like cleaning, cooking, childbearing, rearing, and caring for family members. These tasks are done mostly by women.
Community managing role: Activities undertaken primarily by women at the community level, as an extension of their reproductive role, to ensure the provision and maintenance of scarce resources of collective consumption such as water, health care, and education. This is voluntary unpaid work performed during “free” time.
Community politics role: Activities undertaken primarily by men at the community level, often within the framework of national politics. This officially recognized leadership role may be paid directly or result in increased power or status.
Triple role: This refers to the fact that women tend to work longer and more fragmented days than men as they are usually involved in three different roles: reproductive, productive, and community work.

A Gender Action Plan (GAP) is the plan for gender activities that an institution has adopted for itself. Its purpose is to make the institutions’ activities more effective, efficient, and successful by addressing existing gender inequalities and redefining women’s and men’s gender roles and relations through guidance on gender mainstreaming. Several UN Conventions, Frameworks, and Organizations have their own Gender Action Plans, e.g. the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm conventions; Minamata Convention; the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; and the Convention on Biological Diversity.

Gender analysis is a critical examination of how differences in gender roles, activities, needs, opportunities, and rights/entitlements affect men, women, girls, and boys in certain situations or contexts. Gender analysis examines the relationships between females and males and their access to and control of resources and the constraints they face relative to each other. A gender analysis should be integrated into all sector assessments or situational analyses to ensure that gender-based injustices and inequalities are not exacerbated by interventions and that, where possible, greater equality and justice in gender relations are promoted.

Gender blindness refers to the failure to recognize that the roles and responsibilities of men/boys and women/girls are assigned to them in specific social, cultural, economic, and political contexts and backgrounds. Projects, programs, policies, and attitudes that are gender-blind do not take into account these different roles and diverse needs. They maintain the status quo and will not help transform the unequal structure of gender relations.

This refers to the equal rights, responsibilities, and opportunities of women and men and girls and boys. Equality does not mean that women and men will become the same but that women’s and men’s rights, responsibilities, and opportunities will not depend on whether they are born male or female. Gender equality implies that the interests, needs, and priorities of both women and men are taken into consideration, recognizing the diversity of different groups of women and men. Gender equality is not a women’s issue but should concern and fully engage men as well as women. Equality between women and men is seen both as a human rights issue and as a precondition for, and indicator of, sustainable people-centered development.
The preferred terminology within the United Nations is gender equality rather than gender equity. Gender equity denotes an element of interpretation of social justice, usually based on tradition, custom, religion, or culture, which is most often to the detriment of women. Such use of equity in relation to the advancement of women has been determined to be unacceptable.

Gender focal points are change agents whose overriding role is to advocate for increased attention to and integration of gender equality and women’s empowerment in their agency’s policy and programming and in the related work of development partners. Gender focal points serve as a hub for new information on gender equality and as a conduit for information on what has worked well in the organization. The role of gender focal points differs somewhat from country to country and from agency to agency, depending on where they are placed within the organization and what kind of gender architecture the organization has in place. A gender focal point is not, however, intended to serve as a substitute for a full-time institutional gender specialist. The focal point’s role is often more one of advocacy and facilitating communication and connections related to gender equality and women’s empowerment, but may at times involve providing gender expertise or assisting colleagues and development partners in identifying potential national or international consultants or organizations that have this expertise. Basic functions may include coordinating the organization’s/office’s/program’s gender mainstreaming strategy; contributing gender information and technical support for inclusion of gender issues; supporting capacity development on gender equality within the organization; knowledge management; and coordination on interagency initiatives, among others. ​

Gender mainstreaming refers to “the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is 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.”

Gender-negative refers to project or programme design in which gender inequalities are reinforced in order to achieve desired development outcomes, for example through the use of gender norms, roles, and stereotypes that perpetuate those inequalities.

Gender neutral refers to situations where gender is not considered relevant to development outcomes. Gender norms, roles, and relations are not affected (neither worsened nor improved). However, caution is required, as indirect gendered effects may be easily overlooked (see also: gender blind).

Gender norms are ideas about how men and women should be and act. We internalize and learn these “rules” early in life. This sets up a life cycle of gender socialization and stereotyping. Put another way, gender norms are the standards and expectations to which gender identity generally conforms within a range that defines a particular society, culture, and community at that point in time.

The term “gender perspective” is a way of seeing or analyzing that looks at the impact of gender on people’s opportunities, social roles, and interactions. This way of seeing is what enables one to carry out gender analysis and subsequently to mainstream a gender perspective into any proposed program, policy, or organization. Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies, or programs, in all areas and at all levels. It is a way to make women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of policies and programs 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.

Gender-responsive approaches actively consider and address gender-specific differences. Their goal is to promote gender equality – for example, by implementing regulations that reduce the risks faced by women in female-dominated sectors, such as the textile or cosmetics industries. The term is commonly used in international political discourse.

Gender roles refer to social and behavioral norms that, within a specific culture, are widely considered to be socially appropriate for individuals of a specific sex. These often determine the traditional responsibilities and tasks assigned to men, women, boys, and girls (see gender division of labor). Gender-specific roles are often conditioned by household structure, access to resources, specific impacts of the global economy, occurrence of conflict or disaster, and other locally relevant factors such as ecological conditions. Like gender itself, gender roles can evolve over time, in particular through the empowerment of women and transformation of masculinities.

While gender-sensitive approaches recognize the existence of gender-specific differences, they do not actively address them and work around gender inequalities – for example, collecting sex-disaggregated data without conducting further research to understand these differences.

Gender transformative approaches are the most advanced approaches to gender. Their goal is to challenge and change gender norms, empowering women and promoting equality – such as training indigenous women to advocate for their rights in chemical policy-making.

Gender-disaggregated data is often confused with data disaggregated by sex. But biological sex disregards the socially built power relations and gender norms that exist between and among males, females, and people with other gender identities, ignoring the cultural and systematic disparities that exist. Gendered power relations have significant influence on data collection efforts, health-seeking behaviors, vulnerability to risk factors for non-communicable and other diseases, and the impact of health policies. To understand the root causes of gender inequalities, gender-disaggregated data asks the “who questions:” Who does which tasks? Or who has a higher prevalence of a particular disease? Gender-disaggregated data is important to better identify exposure routes.

A gender-responsive National Action Plan (NAP) is a national plan on chemials management that includes gender aspects. Applying gender-responsive approaches to the development process of a NAP requires attention to gender throughout the iterative cycle of planning, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation. It also means consideration of gender issues in the crosscutting dimensions, including institutional arrangements, capacity development, financing and information sharing related to the NAP process, such as equal participation and influence in decision-making processes and equal access to financial resources and capacity-building for all genders.

Intersectionality describes overlapping or interdependent systems of discrimination related to age, disabilities, ethnicity, gender, geographic location, sex, socioeconomic status, sexuality, etc. Gender should not be considered in isolation. Gender identities, norms, and relations shape and are shaped by other social attributes (Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018).

Intersex people are born with a variety of differences in their sex traits and reproductive anatomy. There is a wide variety of differences among intersex variations, including differences in genitalia, chromosomes, gonads, internal sex organs, hormone production, hormone response, and/or secondary sex traits.

A National Gender Action Plan (e.g. mentioned in GFC) or a Gender Road Map is a step-by-step guidance focused on the gender mainstreaming process in a country, sector, or organization. A national gender action plan is developed by a government, while a gender road map can be developed by any stakeholder and is not directly part of any international processes. Evaluation and monitoring are not mandatory; it is a voluntary document and can take different forms.

An adjective describing a person who does not identify exclusively as a man or a woman. Non-binary people may identify as being both a man and a woman, somewhere in between, or as falling completely outside these categories. While many also identify as transgender, not all non-binary people do. Non-binary can also be used as an umbrella term encompassing identities such as agender, bigender, genderqueer, or gender-fluid.

Sex refers to biology; however, there is no single, universally agreed-upon set of guidelines for defining sex. Sex is complex, dynamic, context-dependent, and interacts with gender and other social factors (Ritz & Greaves, 2022; Dubois et al., 2025).
In humans (and non-human mammals), sex traditionally refers to the biological attributes that distinguish male, female, and/or intersex according to functions that derive from the chromosomal complement (generally XX/XY), reproductive organs (internal and external genitalia), or specific hormonal, environmental, or cultural factors that affect the expression of phenotypic traits (Barresi & Gilbert, 2023; Jones, 2018; Kessler, 1998).

Sex-disaggregated data is typically collected and analyzed in two biological categories: males and females, and then used to develop programs and policies. Sex-disaggregated health data tells you the numbers of men and women affected by a particular disease, condition, or cause of death (Gender Equity Unit, 2024). For example, human biomonitoring data is often disaggregated by sex for comparing population exposures between the sexes. When data is not disaggregated by sex, it is more difficult to identify real and potential inequalities (UNICEF, 2017).