Government agencies and higher education institutions

The Swedish Gender Equality Agency is in charge of two development programmes supporting Swedish higher education institutions and a large number of government agencies in their gender mainstreaming work.

The support provided to the government agencies aims to make them even better able to contribute to the central goal of Swedish gender equality policy, which is for women and men to have the same power to shape society and their own lives. The support is offered in both the planning and implementation phases of the agencies’ development work. The programmes shall also coordinate training efforts, arrange forums for the sharing of experiences among the agencies, identify and disseminate best practices and document the results of the agencies’ work.

As part of the programme Gender Mainstreaming in Government Agencies (GMGA), 58 government agencies and one organisation have been instructed by the government to integrate a gender perspective in all of their operations. The programme was initiated in 2013–2014 with a pilot phase involving 18 volunteer agencies. In 2015, the programme was expanded with 23 new government agencies and in 2016, another 18 agencies and one organisation with certain official responsibilities were added. The programme is scheduled to end in 2018. The web portal Jämställ.nu (English version: Includegender.org) serves as a platform for dissemination of the agencies’ results and experiences.

In 2016-2019, all publically funded Swedish higher education institutions, plus Chalmers University of Technology and Jönköping University, were given a similar assignment, Gender Mainstreaming in Academia (GMA), which instructs the institutions to gender mainstream all of their operations according to individually developed gender mainstreaming plans. The programme has been extended to include 2020 and 2021 and the support is designed in dialogue with the universities.

Prior to the opening of the Swedish Gender Equality Agency, both programmes were run by the Swedish Secretariat for Gender Research on behalf of the Swedish government. The assignments were transferred to the Agency on 1 January 2018.

Gender mainstreaming

Publication date: 9 November 2021

Last updated: 22 December 2022