Obstacles and Challenges of Policy-making based on Gender Equity

Gender equity is a controversial social issue and now with its incorporation into the Sixth Development Plan, policy-making for gender equity is essential. To this end, allocation of more resources and opportunities and implementation of affirmative action policies to achieve gender equity are not sufficient. Women's empowerment in various fields, and not just the economy and employment, is essential to sustainable development. Therefore, considering the need for agency of women in sustainable development, it is necessary to determine the indicators of gender equity and to explain the criteria in public policy to achieve gender equity in the society. The purpose of this qualitative research is to study the obstacles and challenges of policy-making based on gender equity from the perspective of experts. To this end, we collected information through semi-structured interviews with nine experts and researchers in the field of women studies and policy-making. Using qualitative content analysis technique, we categorized the data to answer the main questions of research. According to the findings of this study, the most important challenges of policy-making based on gender equity are: disagreement in defining gender equity, politicization and weakness programming, and the lack of data and statistics. The first step in policy-making based on gender equity is to identify of instance and provide a definition for gender equity.