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Home | Integrating Equality | Equality in policy-making

Ensuring equality in policy-making:
Mainstreaming

Gender mainstreaming is central to the EC’s community action programme and the Government’s efforts to improve public services and encourage greater representation of women in public life.

Gender mainstreaming means that the normal ideas, attitudes or activities of society routinely incorporate a gender perspective and become a normal feature of mainstream thinking. It sends an important message - that everyone is valued equally.

Developing practical tools

The WEU, along with the Equality Impact Team (see below), have developed an easy-to-use gender mainstreaming tool, "Gender Impact Assessment", which puts people at the heart of policy-making, and leads to better Government by making diversity issues visible in the mainstream of society.

It provides a methodology for policy makers to assess whether their policies will deliver equality of opportunity across the board, and helps to challenge policy makers to question the assumption that policies and services affect everyone in the same way.

Equality Impact Assessments can be applied to legislation, policy plans and programmes, budgets, reports and existing policies and services. Ideally, they should be done at an early stage in the decision making process so that policies can be changed – or even scrapped - if necessary.

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Equality Impact Team

The Equality Impact Team informs, encourages and instructs DTI staff in integrating equality into their policies and their services to the public. It is responsible for preparing and monitoring the DTI's Race Equality Scheme and Northern Ireland Scheme, but equally covers gender and disability issues.

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