Generally around the world in ministries such as that, there is a minister responsible and a department that are in fact the institutional mechanism by which a gender and equality strategy is implemented. That's the first part of it. They are supposed to be in charge of implementing it.
For example, if you had a national closing-the-gender-gap plan, then you would have the leadership of a Status of Women committee doing it, and in addition—and this is the important thing—a status of women branch, department, and minister should not be marginalized, in the sense that each of the other ministers has to play a role in the plan so it isn't marginalized as well. In other words, yes, they play a very important role, but the finance minister has to play a very important role and the finance minister has to make sure they are involved in it.
For example, in Ontario I met with the head finance people in the bureaucracy about trying to do a closing-the-gender-pay-gap plan in 2008 around the time of the recession. They couldn't really understand what I was talking about. “What do you mean we should be involved? What would we do?” I was saying, “Well even if you were using infrastructure money, you should be sorting out if you are employing women in that infrastructure money. Are you doing things with the infrastructure money that would help to close the gap? Are you building child care centres with it? Is the bridge you're building actually going to help women's employment in that community?”
These are the kinds of things that actually need to be embedded in government decision-making and in policy decision-making. In all ministries within government, people need to be trained how to think about that kind of gender-based analysis and to incorporate it into their thinking.