Five years ago, gender mainstreaming was a relatively new concept in Central and Eastern Europe and the
CIS. Activists, policy makers and legislators who were concerned with securing greater equality between women and men had made many advances in terms of putting women’s rights on the legislative agenda, but integrating a gender perspective into all areas of policy and decision-making was lagging far behind. This was the main impetus for creating Gender Mainstreaming in Practice: A Handbook.
This handbook is divided into two parts: Part I – Gender Mainstreaming: 10 Steps for Integrating Gender into the Policy-Making Process; Part II – Gender Briefs: A Sectoral Approach to Mainstreaming. Since the development of the first edition of this handbook, it has been translated fully or partly into many local
languages, including Russian, Ukrainian, Latvian, Uzbek and Turkmen, with plans for an Armenian translation underway. It has served as the main source material for numerous training seminars and workshops in the
region, and has served as the basis for the introduction of a short-term but mandatory course in the Academy
of Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation. Its users have included UNDP staff,
parliamentarians, civil servants, lawyers, academics, students, local government employees and NGO activists.
Moreover, it has been accessed on the internet and served as a model and example for other UN agencies and in other regions of the world. Gender mainstreaming makes a gender dimension explicit in all policy sectors. Gender equality is no longer viewed as a “separate question,” but becomes a concern for all policies and programmes. Furthermore, a gender mainstreaming approach does not look at women in isolation, but looks at women and men - both as actors in the development process, and as its beneficiaries.
Significantly, gender mainstreaming differs from a “women in development” (WID) approach in that it takes as its starting point a thorough and rigorous analysis of the development situation, rather than a priori assumptions about women’s roles and problems. Experience has shown that gender issues differ by country, region and concrete situation.