Pressemitteilung

Just what we all needed: gender mainstreaming in child and youth services. "Whatever will be next? Our member associations and facilities in the field have more important things to do" - thus the succinct comment of a social service representative. This valuation of the gender mainstreaming (GM) concept ignores that equality goals were stipulated in Section 9 (3) of the Child and Youth Services Act already back in 1991. Under the title of "gender mainstreaming", the mandate to account for the gender perspective was explicitly included in the promotion guidelines of the Federal Child and Youth Plan (KJP) in December 2000, thus making it obligatory for all child and youth services funded by the KJP to implement the concept. In 2002, the DJI project "Gender mainstreaming in child and youth services" was assigned by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth to provide the scientific monitoring of services implementing the concept. Initial results of the monitoring show that the new gender mainstreaming principle has triggered internal discussions of gender issues among the services at a number of levels, from their organisational structure to human resources to expert activities.