Gender Impact Assessment and Gender Equality
Young Joo KIM (Korea)
According to the Beijing Platform that was adopted at the UN World Conference on
Women in 1995, the concept of gender equality should be considered a major guideline
for all policies. And the platform encouraged all countries to accept ‘Gender Analysis for
Policies’. This shows that gender equality has some limits to being achieved throughpolicies and plans only for women and emphasizes a need to apply a ‘Gender View’ to allpolicies and plans of governments.
This change of paradigm has influenced women's movements and policies for
women in Korea to a large extent. Korea has improved its systems to deal withproblems such as assaults on women and gender discrimination for employment and atwork since the 1990's. However, as there are still various forms of discrimination
against and disadvantages for women in daily life, it became necessary tosystematically and closely analyze various cases of women’s inequality and put forth aneffort to solve them.
Because of these reasons, Korea introduced the Gender Impact Assessment in 2004
and has continued to promote it. In fact, the Gender Impact Assessment had been
introduced in many countries and international institutes before being applied in Korea,
and over 40 countries including the U.K. (Gender Impact Assessment), Canada (GenderAnalysis), the UN, the ILO, etc., have applied this system. These Gender Impact
Assessments analyze gender characteristics and differences and find issues to becorrected, in order to apply them to policies before planning and executing them.
This system can contribute to actual gender equality by eliminating thediscriminating facts of policies. This is because the system guarantees the fairparticipation of men and women and their opportunities for fair development. Now all
departments of the central government, local governments and education offices are
participating in the enforcement procedure of the Gender Impact Assessment, so mostadministrative agencies are carrying out this system.
After executing the Gender Impact Assessment, policies applying to genderdifferences and desires are being carried out. Gender discrimination is also being
corrected in many fields such as welfare, education, culture, local development, etc.,
little by little. For example, in 2007, Seoul City had a ‘Making parks safe for women’campaign through the Gender Impact Assessment for the management andadministration of ‘Seoul Forest’. And, as a result, they installed CCTVs in the park,increased night-time guards, changed 7 bus lines to make them pass the park for easy

accessibility, built baby-carriage rental places and nursing rooms for women’sconvenience, and expanded weekend programs for families.
Korea has recently been strengthening the Gender Impact Assessment system.
Last year, <Gender Impact Assessment Law> was established and it is now being
executed. Therefore, this law should be applied to political projects as well as theregulations and basic plans of the central government and local government. In this way,
the Gender Impact Assessment will be carried out
before preparing those regulations and basic plans.
However,strengtheningtheGenderImpact

Assessment system doesn’t mean that genderequality will automatically be achieved, andassessment is not only for administrative agencies
and public servants. To correctly execute theGender Impact Assessment system and reinforce its
results, all women who are beneficiaries of thispolicy should actively participate in the execution
procedure of this system.

Paving blocks installed in consideration offemale pedestrians

In this regard, the role of NPOs such as
women’s organizations is very important to monitor the results of the Gender Impact
Assessment and its execution as well as to provide suggestions. Furthermore,cooperation and partnership with NPOs is essential to effectively develop the Gender
Impact Assessment system in Korea.