21st-Century Gender Equality Agenda

Written ten years ago, Mukhopadhyay’s article, ‘Mainstreaming Gender or ‘Streaming’ Gender Away’, sits at a fascinating juncture in relation to feminist pathways for changing development institutions to advance cultures of equality. The debates about gender mainstreaming as a conceptual framework and as a strategy had significant resonance during the first ten years of the new century. Gender mainstreaming had been hailed as a strategy of choice at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing held in 1995. Less than a decade later a slew of reports and meetings – from the Norway-sponsored meeting Strategies for Gender Equality: Is Mainstreaming a Dead End? (Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2002) to the metaevaluations undertaken by Norway and others, 1 – contributed to the growing chorus of voices proclaiming the questionable uptake, cost–benefit or results that most large development agencies had experienced with gender mainstreaming. The lack of accountability for implementing policies and strategies, the millions of dollars invested in watered-down gender training, the growing networks of gender specialists struggling with each other and their institutions for a shrinking pie was constantly interrogated by, what Prugl calls, an ‘international cadre of gender experts who play a key role in translating feminist knowledge into policy applications ... [becoming] instruments in the government of gender’ (Prugl 2010). And now – consistent with Mukhopadhyay’s assertions from 2004 – we may be at a point where the voluble criticism of gender mainstreaming may have caused the pendulum to swing in the opposite direction, as we witness the transformative aspect of ‘gender’ disappearing down the development drain. There has been a notable shift in the strategies of choice for securing attention to gender equality and women’s empowerment in large foundations and development institutions. We are in an era when the instrumentalist voices – the World Bank’s ‘investing in women as smart economics’, the McKinsey study,