KWDI Korean Women’s Development Institute

The United Nations (UN) adopted gender mainstreaming as a new strategic paradigm for women policies and led each government to employ gender impact assessment and gender responsive budget in policy-making at its 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995). Accordingly, the Republic of Korea has chosen gender mainstreaming as its key strategy for women policies since the late 1990s.

This paper is a research outcome of two-year project for the effective establishment of gender mainstreaming (GM) system in Korea. The previous study, "The Research on the Effective Establishment of Gender Mainstreaming System[I]: The Status of GM's Acceptability and Institutionalization and Plans for Action" in 2008 showed the civil servants' acceptability of GM and the conditions for its institutionalization, so that it led to suggestions of some ways in which GM could be made effective, including the creation of the platform for GM. Following these research outcomes, the second-year research has mainly focused on the development of action models for GM that major players can create while undertaking its policies at a local level.

Reinterpreting the issues of GM, such as the connection between gender mainstreaming and affirmative action and diversity of social inequalities, it aims to make new models to bring GM into action by seeking the ways, through participatory action research, in which those players of GM including civil servants, gender experts, and NGO activists can establish the collaboration system while carrying out GM in practice. The local experiences gained through which GM was implemented in Busan city, Gangwon province, and southern Chungcheong province and the analyses of overseas experiences of GM demonstrate two ways in which GM can work effectively: one way is to form networks built upon the basic or extended velvet-triangle amongst civil servants, gender experts, and NGO activists; the other is to find ways to improve GM through repetition and circulation of the five-step policy implementation process for policy feedback. This action model shows that gender mainstreaming policies can come to anchor, only if there are policy changes made for the strong connection between GM and affirmative action, the legislation of gender impact assessment, and the practice of gender governance for GM.