NHRI Guidelines for Mainstreaming the Human Rights of Women and Girls into Our Everyday Work 1.2. GENDER MAINSTREAMING AND GENDER SPECIALISATION NHRIs in the Asia Pacific region have made a commitment to promoting gender equality in their countries. Two approaches are generally taken to reach this goal. The first is a gender mainstreaming approach and the second involves the use of specialised mechanisms.6 These two approaches are complementary. They aim to ensure that, firstly, gender issues are integrated into the daily thinking and culture of an organisation and its external work, and secondly, specific gender inequalities are addressed. 1.2.1. Gender mainstreaming Gender equality is the goal. Gender mainstreaming is the strategy.7 Gender mainstreaming is an active process of assessing gender implications across all activities of an organisation, taking action to achieve gender equality and ensuring gender inequality is not perpetuated. Its goal is to achieve formal and substantive gender equality. It identifies how gender-based discrimination and unconscious bias affects women and girls. Gender mainstreaming was established as a major global strategy for achieving gender equality in the Beijing Platform for Action in 1995.8 Since then, considerable effort has been made to integrate a gender perspective and the human rights of women throughout the United Nations system. For example, Sustainable Development Goal 5, which seeks to “achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls,” calls for a gender mainstreaming strategy in all policies and programs. International efforts to integrate a human rights-based gender perspective through a gender mainstreaming approach are important for NHRIs for several reasons. • A clear mandate for the integration of a gender perspective and the human rights of women into the work of NHRIs and other bodies has been established. • It is understood that securing women’s human rights requires explicit and systematic work toward goals of equality and non-discrimination at all stages. • The limitations of women-specific approaches, which can be marginalised within broader institutions, structures and processes, have been highlighted. • The concept of gender mainstreaming and how it can be effectively secured is better understood.9 Gender mainstreaming applies to all aspects of an NHRI’s internal organisation and to its external work. It requires an intersectional analysis to address additional disadvantage experienced by some people as a result of other identities.10 This intersectional discrimination does not always affect women and men equally or in the same way. There are circumstances in which discrimination based on other factors only or primarily affects women, or affects women in a different way, or to a different degree than men. Gender mainstreaming involves developing a variety of responses and solutions to address women’s and girls’ diverse experiences, issues and contexts. For the purposes of these Guidelines, gender mainstreaming is a process that: • Assesses gender considerations, putting into effect strategies to achieve formal and substantive gender equality between women and men • Is inclusive of transgender and those whose gender identity corresponds with that assigned to them at birth • Recognises multiple dimensions of discrimination and disadvantage across intersectional gender groupings and contexts. 10