Compare methods

	Social Relations Approach	Gender Mainstreaming Assessment
Field	Gender Studies	Gender Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	1997
Originator	Naila Kabeer	UN Economic and Social Council (gender mainstreaming, 1997); European Institute for Gender Equality (gender impact assessment methodology)
Type	Applied gender analysis framework	Policy gender analysis method
Seminal source	Kabeer, N. (1994). Reversed Realities: Gender Hierarchies in Development Thought. Verso, London. ISBN: 9780860915843	United Nations Economic and Social Council (1997). Mainstreaming the gender perspective into all policies and programmes in the United Nations system (Agreed Conclusions 1997/2). UN ECOSOC, New York.
Aliases	Social Relations Framework, Kabeer Social Relations Approach	Gender Mainstreaming, Gender Impact Assessment, GIA
Related	4	4
Summary	The Social Relations Approach, developed by Naila Kabeer at the Institute of Development Studies in the early 1990s, is a framework for analysing gender inequality as a product of social relations embedded in institutions rather than as a matter of women's roles alone. It treats human well-being and empowerment as the goal of development, examines how four key institutions — the state, the market, the community, and the family or kinship — produce and reproduce inequality through their rules, resources, people, activities, and distribution of power, and traces the causes of inequality at immediate, underlying, and structural levels.	Gender mainstreaming assessment, operationalised most concretely as gender impact assessment (GIA), is the method used to put into practice the strategy of gender mainstreaming defined by the UN Economic and Social Council in 1997: assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action — legislation, policies, or programmes — in all areas and at all levels, so that gender equality becomes an integral dimension of policy design rather than an afterthought. As a method it screens a proposed policy for gender relevance, gathers sex-disaggregated evidence, evaluates how the policy will affect women and men differently, and recommends adjustments, with monitoring built in.