Gender Equality in public services: a question of justice, efficiency and service quality

What has snow removal, ambulance transport or school performance got to do with Gender Equality? More than it appears atfirst glance, as a short movie named „Sustainable Gender Equality – a film about gender mainstreaming in practice“ shows.

With powerful images, the film starts explaining how Karlskoga, a Swedish city in the province of VĂ€rmland, found out to be unintentionally preferring men. How was this possible and why was the dynamic inefficient both for the citizens and the municipality? Analysis showed that snow removal was biased towards automotive transport and streets used predominantly by men. Women, on the other hand, were found to be mainly going by bike, public transport or by feet (rather than by car), and were more often working in places like hospitals, schools etc. Those access routes commonly used by women had – probably unintentionally – lower priority than those used by men. As a consequence, higher health costs occurred as women were involved in accidents. Prioritising snow removal according to the individual needs of all citizens reduced those costs.

Three more areas, namely public transport, ambulance and school performance, were identified to hold male biases. Reorganisation from a Gender perspective led to a more efficient usage of resources and higher quality public service for both men and women. The film describes some Gender Equality issues using a beautiful metaphor: Compared to a house, Gender Equality has often be consigned to the garden shad, as is has been carried out in several isolated projects. What is the solution? Moving Gender Equality into the house! That means we have to include a Gender perspective in more day-to-day activities. „It’s all about being able to see the everyday relevance“, European Diversity expert, Michael Stuber states, „Understanding D&I dynamics in our organisational cultures gets us to the previously missing elements and therefore allows us to make more progress on Gender and Diversity than before“, he explains with reference to many successful client projects. He underlines that this mainstreaming approach will also be much more sustainable than previous programmes or initiatives that stood alone.

The main message of the film, which is focused on the public sector, is that Gender Equality not only is a question of justice and human rights but also affects efficiency and quality of public services. This insight itself is not groundbreaking news from a Diversity perspective, but the film uses strong and illustrative examples for some of the bottom line effects of Gender and Diversity. It demonstrates how Gender mainstreaming can not only offer benefits for both female and male citizens but also bring about advantages for municipalities, county councils and other publicly funded service providers.

In short: Gender mainstreaming means applying a Gender perspective to all day-to-day activities. Thereby one can improve management of governance structures and focus on individual needs instead of being driven by prejudice. How to get there? Men and women have to be made visible at all organisational levels and processes have to be analysed from a Gender perspective. Hence, based on the detection of quality issues that were previously unknown because analysis tools were too blunt, we can then take actions to achieve higher efficiency and service quality.

The movie was produced by IncludeGender.org, a website launched by JÀmstÀll, which is a Swedish web portal that provides information, facts and news about Gender Equality as well as good practices and tools for gender equality work. You can watch the film here.