SOCA6190 Gender And Social Change
Question:
UN System-wide Gender Focal Point Study
Discuss about the UNDP Terms of Reference for the Gender Focal Point Function.
Answer:
Background
Gender focal point holds certain role for supporting the senior managers and the Secretary-General in order to carry out their responsibilities for implementing the gender mainstreaming in the substantial working programme (Lind 2018). It is to note that the position is not related to the gender equality promotion within the department such as to promote the gender balance, the life issues, the harassment comprising of the gender sensitive issues and sexual harassment. Such issues are taken into consideration by the Departmental Focal Points for Women.
Definition
The Gender focal point is a position where a person is appointed as a gender focal point and have several responsibilities to do and are not necessarily specialists. There major responsibly include- to support the gender mainstreaming through means of advocating, supporting and advising the professional staffs and monitoring the progress.
Responsibilities
It takes a lead role in the preparation of several documents such as the Gender Mainstreaming Strategy document, the Gender Mainstreaming Briefing Kit and the National Gender Profile. With the same, it also work with the local NGOs and the other experts in order to make sure that the National Human Development Report is representing the gender perspective in every chapter (Basu 2017.) Apparently, it also ensures that the report is including a chapter that is providing an overall picture in regard to the gender relations as well as the women rights in the concerned nation. It is also to note that there are certain responsibilities of the management gender focal point in context to program, office management and operations.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strength-
- Among the United Nation Agencies, the gender equality is one of the acknowledged goals and the vitality of achieving it is not challenged (Ahl and Nelson 2015).
- There is an interest in the field of gender issues in the field level, among the NOU staffs directly engaged in the process of project implementation.
Weaknesses-
- The issues on gender are seldom taken into consideration in the project design
- Gender is not involved in the compulsory reporting
- The level of the involvement of gender focal points in the process of decision-making remains very low and it is greatly a function of- the position in the organization as determined highly by the job titles; the department sizes and the sizes of the duty stations (Vohs et al. 2018).
- There is very little or absolutely zero collaboration with the gender focal points and the gender advisers of the IAs.
References:
Lind, A.C., 2018. Power, gender, and development: popular women’s organizations and the politics of needs in Ecuador. In The making of social movements in Latin America (pp. 134-149).
Ahl, H. and Nelson, T., 2015. How policy positions women entrepreneurs: A comparative analysis of state discourse in Sweden and the United States. Journal of Business Venturing, 30(2), pp.273-291.
Vohs, K.D., Baumeister, R.F., Schmeichel, B.J., Twenge, J.M., Nelson, N.M. and Tice, D.M., 2018. Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative. In Self-Regulation and Self-Control (pp. 45-77).
Basu, K., 2017, April. Discrimination as focal point: markets and group identity. In Forum for Social Economics (Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 128-138).
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