Gender equality is a goal in its own right, but it is also vital to the achievement of other development goals, such as poverty reduction and environmental sustainability. To ensure that women and men can equally access, participate, and benefit from development projects, and that gender inequalities in activities and outcomes are reduced or eliminated, gender differences need to be considered during the entire project cycle—from design and implementation to monitoring and evaluation. While UN Women has a specific mandate to work on empowering women, all United Nations agencies have a responsibility to work with a gender perspective and to understand how and where gender issues are relevant to fulfilling their mandate. By systematically mainstreaming gender into its environmental management interventions, UNIDO can ensure equal opportunities for women and men, thus furthering its inclusive and sustainable industrial development (ISID) agenda and contributing to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the post-2015 development framework. The aim of this Guide is to “demystify” gender mainstreaming and to provide practical guidance on how to systematically address gender inequalities specific to UNIDO’s environmental management interventions.
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 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.”