An Assessment Of The Implementation Of Gender Mainstreaming Strategy In Population Policy

Gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights(SRHR)is an important intersection under the analytical framework of population policy.In 1995,gender mainstreaming strategy was proposed on the Fourth World Conference on Women as the guiding principle for UN to promote gender equality within the organization.Along with the implementation of 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals,the strategy has become an internationally recognized approach to integrate gender perspective in policy making and achieve gender equality.Under the similar time frame,sexual and reproductive health and rights is included in population policy discourse in 1994 International Conference on Population and Development,playing a key role in realizing women’s rights and promoting women empowerment.Twenty years afterwards,limited results have been identified on the effects of the strategy and the progress of gender equality in population policy.The assessment of the implementation of gender mainstreaming strategy in population policy around the world is significant,because it provides a comprehensive overview of global gender progress in SRHR,adds to the current research and practice on evaluation of gender progress in international organizations,and provides policy implication on accelerating the progress towards gender equality in population policy.This paper conducts a policy discourse analysis on 175 Voluntary National Reviews using an evaluation mechanism with quantitative analysis and textual analysis to assess whether countries around the world adopt gender mainstreaming strategy in population policy.It is found that issue related to women’s rights,such as reproductive rights are not sufficiently discussed by countries,and most of the countries only mainstream gender in data through disaggregation,but not in other aspects of policy making,such as planning,design and implementation.Countries with lower income level perform better in gender mainstreaming compared with high-income countries,but the overall extent of gender mainstreaming is rather low across the globe.Slow progress and implementation of gender mainstreaming in population development posts challenges to achieve related gender goals by 2030.Suggestions on policy makings are made to give full play to the role of UN at country level,establish corresponding evaluation mechanism and upgrade gender strategy.