Gender-responsive systems analysis and assessment seems to me the solution for mainstreaming and integrating gender, where it must be integrated, to achieve gender equity and gender equality.

The real challenge is in intervening into the system to achieve social change. One route I find quite successful is empowering women in their accepted, current social roles such as economic social roles. The active and conscious influence on social roles and connected socio-cultural systems elements and structures is still a puzzle - and far from our projected causal impact pathways.

One way, I imagine now, is to affect emotions of people regarding the exclusion/inclusion of others, to bring about social change e.g. regarding gender by bringing about emotional engagement regarding the subject. How can this be done? Maybe through people organizing themselves, taking action; or through music, theater, poems, movies ... Another, more important way, is probably to identify the social elements, structures and interrelations, which make, influence and drive a system - and to change them.

Learning, thinking about different subjects is my mainstay in life, and brought me from anthropology, linguistics (my thesis), international relations, economics, financial analysis, business finance, organization consulting, management, strategy elaboration and gender to art, culture and systems thinking. More on: www.karinreinprecht.com