MANILA -- Senior officials from 12 sectoral bodies of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) convened on Thursday to craft a gender mainstreaming action plan in their respective offices.
The ASEAN executives identified and discussed some of the gaps and challenges including lack of specific gender-related projects and a mechanism to monitor gender policies, as well as lack of specific policy on gender mainstreaming itself in some of the ASCC sectoral bodies.
Aside from ASCC, the ASEAN has two other pillars: ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC), and the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC).
Each pillar consists of sectoral bodies, with the ASCC having 19 entities.
During meetings, the 12 sectoral bodies agreed to design strategic actions to address the challenges, including the inclusion of gender equality-focused ASEAN Committee on Women (ACW) in several sectoral meetings such as in the Senior Officials Meeting for Culture and Arts (SOMCA) and the Senior Officials Meeting Responsible for Information (SOMRI).
The next SOMCA is slated in October 2018 while the SOMRI is in May 2019.
While the laid out strategies seemed as if the bloc has yet actualized gender mainstreaming, an expert on gender works lauded the conference's outcome as "historic."
"It means a lot...ACWC and ACW, these groups are among the sectoral bodies that have wider understanding on the subject of gender and women," Dr. Lourdesita Sobrevega-Chan, Philippine Women's Rights Representative to the ASEAN Commission on the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Women and Children (ACWC), told the Philippine News Agency (PNA).
"When I talked to the chairperson, I said 'this is an eye-opener to us'," she said.
"While we have been mouthing ASEAN is full of very progressive gender policies, then we realize that within the pillars of the ASEAN, there is so much work to be done, to make people understand, to make the programs, the processes, and the projects more gender sensitive not even a gender responsive but gender sensitive."
Chan said they welcomed this development since the persons who initiated actions were senior officials of the socio-cultural sector of the bloc.
Based from the meeting's result, she admitted that in the scale of the transactions done, "the gender is still in the periphery."
"Gender work is really a journey," she said. "But the fact that they are here saying officially that we need to do this and that, we now have a basis to continue the work rather than none at all."
"For them to say that there are things to be done, that's a huge thing, this is unprecedented, this is historical in gender advocacy," she said. "Almost all sectoral bodies of the ASCC are here and culture is our main issue here."
Chan shared that when dealing with such huge group that one can say an embodiment of masculinity, the conference's results are indeed a "milestone." (PNA)
