Gender mainstreaming is an ambitious policy strategy to promote equality between women and men. The strategy is not a goal in itself; but, a political mechanism to implement,monitor and evaluate the integration of gender concerns into all policy decisions, legal frameworks, activities and programmes.

Despite strong political commitments to gender mainstreaming, progress towards gender aware policies in the European Union remains slow. This is often due to gaps in knowledge on gender equality and the lack of institutional capacity and competency to effectively identify gender differentiated aspects and impacts of the vast majority of policy fields.

It is clear that Europe needs to invest more in developing staff competence in public administrations. Providing training, expertise, guidelines and resources as well as sharing good practices are all useful methods of enabling effective gender mainstreaming; however gender training is a key tool particularly for building capacity and providing practical gender analysis skills.

Given the European Institute for Gender Equality’s (EIGE) mandate to support gender mainstreaming with research and concrete actions, the Institute will be organising its second conference on the matter.

If you are interested in fostering gender competence development and training as a way forward for gender mainstreaming in the European Union, then take the opportunity to participate in the European conference “Advancing Gender Training to Support Effective Gender Mainstreaming” organised by EIGE on 13-14 November 2012 in Vilnius, Lithuania.

The conference aims at providing a platform for networking, contributing to the debate on gender training and supporting the policy process. More on information on the conference.