Gender is a social construct based on sexual difference. It implies an embedded inequality that affects many areas of society. As an analytical category it allows us to perceive the material and symbolic impact of the gaps, barriers, and inequalities that women must face in the different aspects of their lives (Aguirre & Guevara, 2008). Gender analysis therefore offers a systematic way of observing the differentiated impact of development, politics, programs, and legislation on men and women. The process begins with the collection of disaggregated data based on sex and the gathering of gender-sensitive information that relates to the population involved. Gender analysis can also include the study of the multiple ways in which men and women are involved in strategies to transform the roles, relationships, and processes motivated by their personal or collective interests as social actors.

“Gender equity entails identical or differentiated treatment among men and women that results in a complete absence of any form of arbitrary discrimination against women based on gender, with regard to the enjoyment and exercise of all their human rights.” LAW N° 20.820, Article 1° (Women and Gender Equity Ministry, 2015).

The principle of equality represents one of the fundamental pillars of modern democratic states and is constituted as the ideal of all social organization. Gender equality implies equivalence; that is, people have the same value independent of gender and are therefore equal. This includes the norms, values, attitudes, and perceptions that are required to achieve equality between men and women without neutralizing their differences (UNDP, 2006: 73).

Gender order can be seen in institutional spaces like the family, community, market, school, business, and the State, among other things. It refers to many different dimensions, among which we can identify two main areas. The first corresponds to the activities and concrete relations that sustain men and women, among them gender roles, the sexual division of labor or power relations. The second alludes to social representations of the feminine and the masculine, which point to ideas of what it means to be feminine and masculine, gender identities, hegemonic models of femininity and masculinity, etc. In short, the obligation to be feminine and masculine (UNDP, 2006).