Legal Assessment and Policy for Gender Equality
1. Gender Impact Assessment
2. Gender Budgeting
▪The gender impact assessment and gender budgeting were introduced with a view to the “national achievement of gender equality.”
1.The gender impact assessment is a legal measure to analyze government policies from the perspective of gender equality with the aim of identifying and removing the elements of gender inequality in them.
2. Gender budgeting refers to the institutional system to analyze how a specific approach to budgeting will impact both sexes and feed the analysis results back into the actual budgeting process. It also assesses whether past budgets benefited both sexes equally and helped improve gender equality. The assessment is reflected in the next year’s budget planning.
The gender impact assessment and gender budgeting were first proposed as part of the strategy to achieve gender equality and raise awareness of gender issues across the international community. They were suggested as alternatives to the Women-in-Development (WID) and Gender and Development (GAD), the two most typical approaches since the 1970s, which were found to have limitations in solving gender issues and achieving gender equality.
▪In accordance with this global trend, the government of the Republic of Korea instituted and implemented the two schemes at a short interval.
▪The gender impact assessment found its legal basis in the Framework Act on Women’s Development revised in 2002, while gender budgeting is based on the National Finance Act enacted in 2006.
▪The two schemes share the same values and purposes in that they both aim to achieve gender equality.
The Republic of Korea invented the ‘National Gender Equality Index,’ by which it assesses and announces the level and the trend of gender equality every year. The gender impact assessment and gender budgeting serve as institutional and financial instruments of connecting and improving various gender equality policies. The index evaluates gender equality on a scale of 0.0 (perfect inequality) to 100.0 (perfect equality). After the gender impact assessment and gender budgeting were implemented, the index rose from 67.8 (in 2011) to 72.2 (in 2016).
1.All central government agencies and local governments are required to implement gender impact assessment through the GIS, a system created by the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family. While assessment itself does not require a budget, post-assessment implementation does. It varies by policy and project.
2.Gender-sensitive budget stands at 24,984,139,100 dollar as of 2017
Korea scored 72.7 points in the 2016 Gender Equality Index