Gender Focal Point: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Definition

This report provides an overview of the Gender Focal Point, a role supporting senior managers in implementing gender mainstreaming. It differentiates this position from Departmental Focal Points for Women, focusing on advocating, supporting, and advising staff, as well as monitoring progress. The report details responsibilities, including document preparation and collaboration with NGOs. It analyzes strengths, such as the acknowledged goal of gender equality, and weaknesses, such as limited project integration and decision-making influence. The report highlights issues like lack of collaboration with gender advisors and offers insights into improving the effectiveness of this critical role within organizations.

Running head: GENDER FOCAL POINT
Gender Focal Point
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author note:

1GENDER FOCAL POINT
Background
Gender focal point holds certain role for supporting the senior managers and the
Secretary-General in order to carry out their responsibilities for implementing the gender
mainstreaming in the substantial working programme (Lind 2018). It is to note that the
position is not related to the gender equality promotion within the department such as to
promote the gender balance, the life issues, the harassment comprising of the gender sensitive
issues and sexual harassment. Such issues are taken into consideration by the Departmental
Focal Points for Women.
Definition
The Gender focal point is a position where a person is appointed as a gender focal
point and have several responsibilities to do and are not necessarily specialists. There major
responsibly include- to support the gender mainstreaming through means of advocating,
supporting and advising the professional staffs and monitoring the progress.
Responsibilities
It takes a lead role in the preparation of several documents such as the Gender
Mainstreaming Strategy document, the Gender Mainstreaming Briefing Kit and the National
Gender Profile. With the same, it also work with the local NGOs and the other experts in
order to make sure that the National Human Development Report is representing the gender
perspective in every chapter (Basu 2017.) Apparently, it also ensures that the report is
including a chapter that is providing an overall picture in regard to the gender relations as
well as the women rights in the concerned nation. It is also to note that there are certain
responsibilities of the management gender focal point in context to program, office
management and operations.
Strengths and Weaknesses

2GENDER FOCAL POINT
Strength-
1. Among the United Nation Agencies, the gender equality is one of the acknowledged
goals and the vitality of achieving it is not challenged (Ahl and Nelson 2015).
2. There is an interest in the field of gender issues in the field level, among the NOU
staffs directly engaged in the process of project implementation.
Weaknesses-
1. The issues on gender are seldom taken into consideration in the project design
2. Gender is not involved in the compulsory reporting
3. The level of the involvement of gender focal points in the process of decision-making
remains very low and it is greatly a function of- the position in the organization as
determined highly by the job titles; the department sizes and the sizes of the duty
stations (Vohs et al. 2018).
4. There is very little or absolutely zero collaboration with the gender focal points and
the gender advisers of the IAs.

3GENDER FOCAL POINT
References:
Lind, A.C., 2018. Power, gender, and development: popular women’s organizations and the
politics of needs in Ecuador. In The making of social movements in Latin America (pp. 134-
149).
Ahl, H. and Nelson, T., 2015. How policy positions women entrepreneurs: A comparative
analysis of state discourse in Sweden and the United States. Journal of Business
Venturing, 30(2), pp.273-291.
Vohs, K.D., Baumeister, R.F., Schmeichel, B.J., Twenge, J.M., Nelson, N.M. and Tice, D.M.,
2018. Making choices impairs subsequent self-control: A limited-resource account of
decision making, self-regulation, and active initiative. In Self-Regulation and Self-
Control (pp. 45-77).
Basu, K., 2017, April. Discrimination as focal point: markets and group identity. In Forum
for Social Economics (Vol. 46, No. 2, pp. 128-138).