Gender Mainstreaming in a Liberal Democracy: A Rawlsian Feminist Defense

Gender mainstreaming is adopted globally as a strategy for enhancing women’s equality. However, gender mainstreaming is not only criticized as ineffective inredressing gender injustices, but it also causes concern regarding the compatibility of its influential policies with citizenship in a liberal democracy. In this paper, I explore methods for applying gender mainstreaming that are suitably effective and liberal. Thus, I first argue that the achievement of women’s substantive equality in apluralistic democracy through a policy of gender mainstreaming is crucially dependent on citizens following a minimalist norm based on John Rawls’ politicalliberalism, that is, the personal political duty of each person is to respect all citizens as free and equal. Then, I discuss how the recognition of this minimalist duty canresolve the apparent tension between citizenship in a liberal democracy and gendermainstreaming, aligning them in effective harmony.