Gender Mainstreaming in the Policies, Programmes and Activities of Ministries of Labour and Social Affairs in ESCWA Member Countries: Guide

This guide reviews gender mainstreaming in institutional plans, policies and programmes, and highlights key steps taken with a view to integrating gender-related issues into programmes and activities of formal institutions. The guide underlines the fact that national machineries for women must be involved in the gender mainstreaming process, since those machineries play a key role at the national level in monitoring, implementing, evaluating and following up on all issues that impact women. This guide also contains a comparative analysis of successful actions as set forth in reports drawn up by the ministries of labour and social affairs in Kuwait, Palestine and the Syrian Arab Republic, and reviews methodologies and working methods used to collect and analyse data. Furthermore, the guide aims to disseminate the lessons learned from those studies and contains suggestions on how to step up efforts to promote gender mainstreaming in the plans, policies and programmes of all institutions, with a view to achieving gender parity