Thank you very much for the invitation.
I'm speaking to you today as somebody's who's been researching gender mainstreaming internationally for more than 15 years now in developed and developing countries and in countries in transition. I have assisted governments and international agencies in the development of handbooks, tools, and guides, and participated in the delivery of direct training in Canada to a number of federal departments and provincial governments. Mostly notably, I worked with Status of Women Canada in 2010, helping to develop GBA+, both conceptually and in terms of training materials and resources.
I currently hold a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant to examine how different countries are entering into a second generation of mainstreaming equality. One of the case studies is Canada, and I intend to speak to all federal departments and their provincial and territorial counterparts working on gender analysis.
Today, however, I would like to organize my comments to you in two broad categories, namely implementation and conceptualization. I hope that in the latter part of my presentation I'll be very provocative.
The message I want to convey is that research has clearly shown what is necessary for the systemic institutional implementation of gender mainstreaming. We don't need to look at this any more. We don't need more investigations. We don't need to be looking at additional barriers. What we need are concrete actions. There are five points around what is necessary for implementation, and each of my colleagues has already touched on some of them.
First, we need a supportive political environment, support from the highest levels, political champions, and a strong impetus to mainstream so that the responsibility does not lie within one government department such as Status of Women Canada. We need financial and human resources to do the work, especially in Canada where, historically, status has been so incredibly marginalized and under-resourced. It's no wonder we're at this point, really. We have to somehow make this work of high value, not of low value, for those who are being asked to implement it.
Second, we need training and education. As Dr. Hanson mentioned, this is not a one-off exercise. One has to tackle, in an ongoing fashion, questions such as what is equality, what is equity, and what is gender. Debunk the idea that gender is about women. Now I think this is a hard sell coming from a department that probably needs a name change, Status of Women Canada. Gender is not just women.
We have to start from where people are with training and education. It has to resonate with the work of those who are applying gender analysis. It always amazes me that there's so little communication across departments. There's a plethora of guides, handbooks, and tools, but no coordination or consistency. We need examples, of course, for each of those different contexts, but there needs to be some consistency across the board. There's a real role for outreach, not just to civil society, but to policy schools. We need analysts in training to understand that this is important work so that they don't get to government and suddenly be told, “Guess what? GBA is part of good policy analysis. It's not an add-on.”
Third, we need to show a strong evidence base for the value added by GBA. This requires improved data collection and thinking creatively about reaching out to experts outside of government such as civil society and researchers in the field, especially given the time-sensitive nature of requests. Put forward policy challenges to students in policy schools. Have them engage in this kind of collaboration. It works; it's great for the students; and it's cheap. It's free.
Fourth, there must be accountability mechanisms. If there are no consequences for not doing it, why do it? We know this. There needs to be some kind of legislation and definitely some kind of sanctions.
Finally, there must be monitoring and evaluation. While we are starting to talk about this, it's often done without a reflection on what is actually the desired goal and outcome. How will we know if GBA has been successfully and fully integrated? What would that actually look like?
We need to document success stories, and not just success stories in Canada. We need to move beyond that kind of navel-gazing to look at international success stories. I think this is very important.
Shifting now to the part of conceptualization. I've been arguing for a while now that the preoccupation with implementation deflects from serious conversations about what we are mainstreaming when we are mainstreaming gender.
To begin, in Canada there is huge confusion with the language of gender mainstreaming: in the Auditor General's report, it's GBA and GBA+, and the Public Health Agency of Canada has sex- and gender-based analysis. They are all very different, and there's confusion. I would also argue that there are inherent limitations in all of these approaches, and I'm going to be provocative and say it's time for a post-GBA and even a post-GBA+ conversation.
Equality will not be achieved by focusing only on gender or on gender as always the most important or significant factor in analysis. We know from research, we know from evaluation, that gender mainstreaming, gender-based analysis, and even GBA+ do not disrupt gender as a primary focus; nor do they naturally lead to the consideration of other factors.
Other factors are often just as important as or even more important than gender. This is an uncomfortable truth: differences among women and among men are often as significant as if not more significant than differences between men and women; and men are sometimes subordinate to some women, and some women exercise power over men. This really is a challenge to the work.
We also have increasingly diverse populations, not just in Canada but internationally. Let's consider the trends in Canada, however. By 2031, 29% to 32% of Canadians will belong to a visible minority. One third will have a mother tongue that is neither English nor French. Canada is already home to more than 200 different ethnic origins. Increasing numbers are identifying with multiple ethnicities.
What we need is the development of new frameworks. We've been doing GBA for over 20 years now. We need new ways of mainstreaming equality that are better suited to understanding and responding to the multi-dimensional and context-driven nature of oppression and discrimination.
I would argue that this is a natural evolution of gender-based analysis and even of GBA+. What we need is the language of intersectionality or the foundations of an intersectional framework.
This is not a new idea. GBA+, for example, talks about the need to integrate intersectionality. What this means is to understand that human beings are shaped by an interaction of different factors—race, ethnicity, indigeneity, class, sexuality, geography, age, disability, and migration status. We need to focus on the relationship and the dynamics of these factors, not assuming that any one of them is a priori more important than another. That doesn't mean gender isn't important, but we have to complicate our understanding of it.
If we continue to prioritize gender, and in particular while lumping society into two homogeneous groups, men and women, it won't matter how well or systematically we are implementing our mainstreaming strategies, because we're not going to be using the right approach to advance equality.
Just last week I gave a talk to the World Health Organization in Geneva in which these exact points were being discussed in the context of the new STGs, the sustainable development goals, of which of course Canada is a signatory. I just want to leave you with the point that we have to fundamentally rethink how we are thinking about equality in order to ensure that the new mission of the STGs, leaving no one behind, is actually achieved. This is how Canada will re-establish its international leadership in advancing equality.