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International Women's Day @ Thursday, March 08, 2007 6:22 PM
Today is International Women's Day. A good day to remember that Gender Equality is not only desirable and fair per se, it is also Smart Economics, promoting growth and poverty reduction.Read the full World Bank's Gender Action Plan. Nicola
re: Gender Fatigue: What can we do to overcome it? @ Friday, June 29, 2007 10:28 AM
I agree with the author's views that fixed formula based and gender mainstreaming type technical approaches take care of only one aspect of the most complicated gender inequality problem in particualrly the more traditional societies.Cultural,tradition-based and ethnic practices, or the so-called customary laws continue in our day to affect,adversely,women's lives and their "capabilities" formation at multiple levels that escape the immediate services zones of the governments and institutional set up.ODI falls into this trap as well.Whay is not seen or immediately visible are not taken into programme and policy intervention frameworks.What creates more inequality for women in the traditon based societies are often those abusive cultural,religious fundamentalist, and traditional practices that legitimizes women's non-citizen,non-person and non-individual image and persists values to that effect.Governments,rational society laws and institutions are not always able to cope with the practices that are lived at multiple/ stratified levels of the society.ODI policies are also not very reflective of this fact.This is perhaps the reason why much of ODI funds allocated for gender equality programmes, have not been well utilized since projects/programmes are designed on the basis of fixed technical facts and a rational knowledge base.ODI policies should give more attention to the culture and gender studies that are being carried out in the last 10 years or so in the traditional and religiously governed societies by the gender researchers.More and more CSOs and Natioanl governments are changing programmatic approaches as a result of these studies that provide great insights into the conditions of many forms of life for women in the communities where forms of patriarchy and extremist religious practices are predominantdespite a seemingly rational forms of government and a modern nation0state.
re: Gender Fatigue: What can we do to overcome it? @ Wednesday, February 13, 2008 7:42 AM
I am searching for articles documenting good practices among pastoral communities (livestock herders)of Asia and even though I can find some for Africa there is not much mention of the contribution of women to livestock rearing. Yet images of livestock will invariably have women carrying loads of leaves and grass and grazing sheep and goats and milking the milch cattle. Then why is it that influential organisations sponsoring research and publication of articles will stop short of just examining and discussing unequeal access to property like land but seldom discussing positive contribution of women to the whole livestock production specially in transhumant systems. Even rearing young children which produces labour for shepherding services and feeding animals and caring for the young animals are seldom discussed - has this anything to do with difficulty in talking to women in pastoral communities of Asia? Or again is it just not being able to take into account non-market contributions of women to family? We have made a move to calculate the services of house-wives to national income then why is it very few people care to examine and write about women contributing to such difficult life-styles of nomadic and transhuming peoples of Asia?
Tackling violence against women: High in rhetoric, low in practice? @ Thursday, November 20, 2008 4:47 PM
This blog marks the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, on 25 November -- a brief moment to reflect on the state of women’s rights and empowerment. It argues that complacency in tackling gender concerns is reinforcing appalling
re: Gender Fatigue: What can we do to overcome it? Re: Men and "Menstreaming" @ Thursday, February 19, 2009 3:20 PM
It is not a new observation to say that the term gender refers to both men and women, while in practice with development programmes at least, gender has been associated with a focus on women only. Clearly, if the World Bank is now talking about "menstreaming", the penny is finally dropping that, while, women are a pivotal element in development - depending on ground realities, either in a positive or negative sense - men are at least as pivotal (postive or negative), if not more so. If they are acting in the "positive", then they facilitate women's development which in turn has that much talked about pivotal effect on development.
So basically what is being said here is that men are the gate keepers to development. Hence, to put it bluntly, men effectively, in many contexts, e.g. HIV/AIDS in the developing world, or as recently noted on the BBC, alcoholism in Scotland, have to be saved from themselves. Gender mainstreaming then must urgently refocus on men's development if, for example, HIV/AIDS is to be stopped. My own experience in Africa, in Nigeria, on the ground, with a team of Nigerian staff, during a period of continous and extensive road travel demonstrated the key ingredients of the HIV/AIDS disaster in action: while sex is also treated as a recreational activity in many western countries (as well as by Westerners in developing countries), hence increasing the chance of fast transmission of disease across a population, my Nigerian (all male) team members pursued it at a much more intensive level inspite of the HIV/AIDS threat. It became clear to me from that experience that programmes focused only on women would have little impact on HIV/AIDS. See for example the paper by Walsh and Mitchell, "'I'm too young to die': HIV, masculinity, danger and desire in urban South Africa", Gender & Development, vol 14: 1, March 2006. Focusing on drugs for treatment is not the response that should be prioritised to save lives. Uganda showed that prevention of infection was the only effective response. The effect of current gender roles and their behaviours will have a perdictable effect in other areas of development. The recent destruction of girls primary schooling in Swat district in Pakistan is a case in point.
There is a growing concern in academic and practitioner circles alike that 12 years after the lofty optimism of the 1995 UN Beijing Conference on Women we have reached a state of ‘gender fatigue’. The energy of global women’s movements appears to be waning; gender mainstreaming initiatives have not lived up to expectations; and donor and government funding for gender equality remains static or in some cases is even in decline, despite the fact that a significant number of countries are off-track in terms of meeting the Millennium Development Goal on gender empowerment. What steps can we as development researchers and practitioners take to tackle such weariness?
Foster more realistic expectations about women’s role in ‘solving poverty’
As highlighted by last month’s high level World Bank meeting in Berlin on 'Gender Equality as Smart Economics' (more>), it is encouraging that mainstream development discourses are increasingly recognising the linkages between gender empowerment and broader poverty reduction and development goals. However, there is a persistent danger that in the absence of more fundamental shifts in power relations between men and women, that these policy interventions are placing unrealistic expectations on women in poverty. Recent work that ODI has contributed to for example in India and Peru suggests that we need to ask hard questions about the trade-offs between government and donors’ enthusiasm for using women targeted programmes as a conduit for broader social service delivery on the one hand, and the capacities and desires of the women involved, as well as providing resources to compensate for their time, on the other. (PDF>). There is a tendency to want to achieve too much with too little. For instance, many of Andhra Pradesh’s (India) 500,000 plus women’s self-help groups are being called upon to deliver school meals, monitor local health service providers, administer pension payments etc. but without adequate investment in loan provision, vocational skills training or adult literacy, all necessary components to facilitate the original purpose of these groups, women’s economic empowerment. (PDF>).
Take history seriously
On hindsight many development analysts and practitioners have been insufficiently realistic about the scale and depth of change that is required in order to bring about more gender equal societies. As a rich body of feminist historical analysis documents, gendered social structures and institutions across diverse country contexts and historical junctures have proven remarkably malleable. While specific legal or institutional manifestations may change, gender remains deeply embedded throughout society (political institutions, communities, households), in people’s daily beliefs and practices, and as such is frequently used by political actors as a mobilising or labelling tool. Therefore we need to be encouraging donors and governments to invest in long-term, multi-faceted initiatives if we are to create the enabling conditions for sustainable change. Perhaps nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than in ODI and others’ work on inter-generational transfers of poverty and the multiple interfaces at which poverty and gender intersect in this process (PDF>).
Recognise achievements and best practices
A sobering look at the weight of history needs to be balanced however with initiatives to remember the histories of struggle to combat gender discrimination and improvements to date in advancing women’s political, civil and socio-economic rights (for an innovative community of practice on just this topic check out: www.iknowpolitics.org). My first reaction when I hear talk of a ‘post-feminist’ age and gender dismissed as an unimportant social cleavage is to get upset – statistics on the ubiquity of gender violence and the woeful record of prosecution for such crimes should alone be enough to convince any sceptic about the dangerous realities of gender inequalities (more>). But a smarter response would be to take occasions like International Women’s Day (March 8) to encourage school and university teachers to teach students about the history of the first and second wave women’s movements (in the North and South) and what these activists achieved, often at considerable personal and social cost. Too often there is a rather simplistic assumption that greater gender equality will simply follow economic development rather than being a dynamic process in which deliberate collective action efforts to reshape gender relations often play a critical role. (Here one only has to look at the stark contrast between national GDP and HDI rankings on the one hand, and corresponding Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) scores in parts of East Asia and the Middle East).
Gender equality is as much about men and masculinities as women and feminism…
Despite an emphasis on relationships in gender analysis, too many development initiatives continue to focus on women in isolation. But if we are going to invest in programmes to empower girls and women and tackle internalised attitudes of gender-based inferiority, we also need to be working with boys and men and addressing equally harmful understandings of masculinity. While we should perhaps be weary of some of the implications of the WB’s latest call for a 'Menstreaming' approach (more>), broader recognition that development initiatives aimed at promoting gender equality and social justice need to involve men more centrally is doubtlessly welcome. For example, we urgently need to explore ways in which care economy responsibilities can simultaneously become de-linked from notions of femininity alone and positively associated with new constructs of male identity in diverse cultural contexts.
Context-specificity matters
Recent gender mainstreaming evaluations have underscored the failure to translate conceptual knowledge into programmatic practice (more>). In order to encourage greater local ownership of the gender equality agenda, there is a clear need to combat what some scholars are terming ‘gender fables’ and ‘stylised myths’ – i.e. overly simplistic arguments about gender relations that have been widely adopted in the development field – and promote more historically and culturally-sensitive gender analyses across diverse policy sectors. Just as empirical experience is demonstrating that there are multiple paths to poverty reduction, economic and political development, so too will there be diverse routes to gender equality. We should not await a technocratic quick-fix to gender inequalities (as some mainstreaming initiatives have tended to do) but instead brace for a long-haul, deeply political challenge.
This blog post features the author's personal view and does not represent the view of ODI.
