KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

Evaluation of the Outcomes of Gender Impact Analysis

and Assessment in Incheon and Improvement Strategies

 

Yoon, Yeonsook
Park, Hongju
Han, Mikyung

 

Since Incheon-Si began to conduct Gender Impact Analysis & Assessment (GIA) in 2005, the GIA has been expanded in terms of its numbers of analyzed projects. The GIA has been further developed at the local government level since the enforcement of the Gender Impact and Assessment Act in 2012. The strategies for establishing the GIA system were also discussed.

Incheon-Si and sub districts such as Gun and Gu provide education program for government employees in order to promote the GIA. The government employees in charge of the GIA also hold workshops to share their experiences and find ways to promote the system, while seeking ways to encourage citizen participation. In addition, since its establishment in 2012, the GIA center in Incheon has supported the implementation of the GIA.

Accordingly, there has been an agreement on the reinforcement of GIA promotion system, the increase of numbers of potential GIA projects, the reliability of the GIA report, and the reinforcement of the GIA supporting system. However, at this point, we should consider what the ultimate goals of the GIA are, and how we assess the outcomes of the GIA in terms of its contribution to gender equality. Therefore, based on the index for assessing GIA outcomes developed by the Korean Women’s Development Institute, the present study aimed to conduct the GIA, analyze the outcomes, and find ways to improve the GIA system.

The index for assessing the GIA outcomes include two main areas, ‘the degree of the GIA system development’, and ‘the degree of gender equality achieved by the GIA system.’ The first index consists of sub-areas including the establishment of legal basis for the GIA, the GIA promotion system, the budget for implementing the GIA, the GIA outcomes, and the education system for cultivating government employees’ understanding of gender sensitive policies or the GIA. The second index includes sub-areas such as the institutional accountability for implementing gender-equality policies, the reinforcement of female representation, the support for devising policies gender-equally, the cultivation of government employees’ gender sensitivity, and the creation and utilization of gender statistics and qualitative data. In doing so, we took into account the characteristics of Incheon-Si by adding indices measuring the promotion system, the development of new GIA projects, and the degree of government employees’ gender sensitivity.

In order to evaluate the current states of the GIA in Incheon, we classified the GIA projects into the GIA of institutions and of representative projects. The target institutions were selected based on the adequacy of analysis units, the validity of policy outcomes, and the solidity of cooperation system. The target projects were selected on the basis of the appropriateness of the feedback system, the degree of citizens’ satisfaction, and the formation of community networks. The two representative projects are the ‘Comfortable 500 steps for Women’ and the ‘Grassroots Center for Women’ in Bupyeong-Gu. Regarding the development of the GIA system as an institution, both Incheon-Si and Bupyeong-Gu established gender mainstreaming system within the organization (e.g., the GIA for law and ordinances as an evaluation criteria on promotion system and department assessment). In particular, Bupyeong-Gu drew government employees’ attentions and strengthened the foundation for gender-sensitive policies by revising the GIA ordinances including the appointment of the GIA officials, specification of their duties, and encouragement of citizen participations. Bupyeong-Gu also established the foundation for local governance. Incheon-Si developed the GIA promotion system to enhance its effectiveness by encouraging cooperations between the officials and the center for the GIA (e.g., the selection of new projects and consulting). In addition, both Incheon-Si and Bupyeong-Gu secured budgets for education programs and gender-mainstreaming researches to implement the GIA. Incheon-Si run its own gender-sensitive education programs which represent the characteristics and needs of individual participants based on their positions.

Regarding its gender professionalism, both Incheon-Si and Bupyeong-Gu specify the GIA tasks on their web-pages, which officialize the GIA within organizations. By suggesting to make more than 30% of new projects the GIA targets annually, Incheon-Si actively implemented the GIA and secured large numbers of target projects and improved cases from gender perspective. However, two-year rotation system of government employees delayed the achievement of gender professionalism and substantiality in the GIA process.

Next, Incheon-Si and Bupyeong-Gu have achieved gender equality through the implementation of the GIA. Incheon-Si actively sought new target projects for the GIA, which enabled the GIA in more various areas. By publishing best practices of the GIA in Incheon, its collection enhanced our understanding of the GIA outcomes and improved the process of the GIA. Incheon-Si and Bupyeon-Gu also considered the outcomes of the GIA as the evaluation criteria of the department. However, because of the lack of incentives, it was not enough to draw attentions from government employees or to encourage active participations, which requires further improvement strategies.

For institutional accountability, Bupyeong-Gu successfully implemented gender-equality policies based on the supports from the head and district assemblies. For example, the improvement of community environments lead to enhance the quality of citizens’ lives and achieve a high level of citizens’ satisfaction, which further encouraged women’s active participation. The women’s network in a community improved private and public governance. Furthermore, according to the case analysis, the gender-equality policies gave advantages to various groups including males and community members, while also increasing females’ advantages from those policies. Most of all, the formation of private and public governance encouraged citizens’ participation in citizens’ council, students’ council, and married women SNS supporters for the grassroots center, which increased the satisfaction of both women and men. However, at the initial stage of projects, citizens did not actively participate in sharing opinions. We need strategies to encourage citizens’ participation and keep the sustainability of the outcomes of private and public governance.

In conclusion, the significance of evaluation criteria in the GIA guidelines, the factors shaping the GIA outcomes and improvement strategies were discussed. First of all, we examined the significance of the evaluation criteria in the GIA guidelines in three aspects. 1) With those criteria, we can evaluate the degree of the GIA system development and the development trajectories. 2) Those criteria will help us to assess the organizations implementing the GIA in various aspects, which further enable the improvement of the environments of gender-mainstreaming policies. 3) Those criteria will also compare differences between organizations at various dimensions (e.g., provincial assemblies, metropolitan councils, and local governments).

According to the analysis of the GIA outcomes, the important determinants of the GIA outcomes were the attentions from the head and district assemblies, the evaluation and incentives based on the implementation of the GIA, and the cooperation system with local women’s policy institutes.

In addition, to improve the GIA outcomes, government officials mainly in charge of the GIA are needed to be appointed to connect with relevant systems and policies, secure the budgets for the GIA, select new projects of the GIA, investigate/improve feedback systems, publish guidelines for improvement strategies of individual target projects, enhance the quality of quantitative evaluation criteria, make incentive programs, organize the promotion systems for implementing the GIA in local community, and form a social consensus by promoting the GIA system to publics.