Confronting Gender Equality

Sammanfattning: Gender inequality is a problem that is interlinked with many other development issues. The UN have for long time been in the forefront when it comes to addressing gender equality and development, but has also been criticized for lacking an adequate understanding of gender. With the theoretical departure in gender mainstreaming as strategy for institutional policy-making, discourse analysis as my methodological approach and the UN gender discourse as my research focus, the intention of this paper is to analyze how the understanding of gender and gender equality can be interpreted in UN policies and documents on poverty reduction and post-conflict security. The purpose is also to compare the understanding of gender equality within the two separate issues in order to see if the same underlying values and norms can be found. The result of the study revealed that although the overall understanding of gender did not differ as much between the two issues as was initially expected, other shortcomings could be found which insinuates a clash between a will to have a modern approach to gender equality in policies and commitments and a more traditional notion that often appeared in the suggested efforts. In the conclusion, I discuss the positive and negative aspects of the findings, and reflects on the need for a more consistent and coherent understanding of gender equality in the UN gender discourse, which I believe would lead to improved and more efficient efforts when it comes to eliminating gender inequalities.