UNDERSTANDING GENDER

INTRODUCTION

Gender is an important consideration in development. It is a way of looking at how

social norms and power structures impact on the lives and opportunities available to
different groups of men and women. Globally, more women than men live in poverty.
Women are also less likely than men to receive basic education and to be appointed to
a political position nationally and internationally. Understanding that men and women,
boys and girls experience poverty differently and face different barriers in accessing
services, economic resources and political opportunities helps to target interventions.

Organisations that work in communities and try to address development and to empower
people, should take the issue of gender very seriously. Many development activists see
"the people" as their target group and do not try to understand the different realities of
men and women's lives. Even in cases where women are specially mentioned as the
most important target group, proper analysis is seldom done about the impact a project
or policy will have on the lives of women.

An example is a rural job creation project that aimed to deal with the fact that 40% of
people in a community are unemployed. The planners failed to further analyse this figure
and did not realise that in fact only 20% of men were unemployed while a massive 60%
of women had no work. About half the poorest families in the area were also headed by
single women. The project involved employing people to build a 20km road and required
that 30% of the workers should be women. Because of the higher percentage of men
employed and the lower level of unemployment, the project made a big difference to the
economic situation of men and their families. The economic status of single women who
headed families was hardly affected. Women who did work on the project also had great
difficulty because they worked long hours and could not attend to all their other
responsibilities such as childcare, cooking, housekeeping, fetching wood and water, etc.
A proper analysis of the needs and conditions of women may have lead to a project that
employed more women for shorter hours.

Understanding gender and applying a basic gender analysis are essential tools for
development activists. You do not have to be a gender activists who wants to work for the
emancipation and equality of women to use a gender analysis. Every community or
development activist who wants to improve the lives of people should know how to use
these tools.

PRESENTATION:
What is gender and why does it matter?

Before undertaking a gender analysis, it is important to understand the concept of ‘gender’.

According to the World Development Report (WDR) 2012, gender is defined as socially
constructed norms and ideologies which determine the behaviour and actions of men and
women. Understanding these gender relations and the power dynamics behind them is a
prerequisite for understanding individuals’ access to and distribution of resources, the ability to
make decisions and the way women and men, boys and girls are affected by political processes
and social development.

Compared with men, women control fewer political and economic resources, including land,
employment and traditional positions of authority. Acknowledging and incorporating these
gender inequalities into programmes and analyses is therefore extremely important, both from a
human rights perspective and to maximise impact and socioeconomic development. The WDR
2012 highlights the importance of directly targeting the persistent constraints and obstacles to
women’s equality (especially in areas of economic empowerment, educational gaps,
household/societal voice, and violence against women) in order to enhance productivity and
improve longer-term development outcomes. Gender equality is also important for sustainable
peace, and there is a growing body of empirical evidence suggesting that a higher level of
gender inequality is associated with higher risks of internal conflict.

The development of gender on the international agenda

The concept of gender emerged with Ester Boserup’s influential work in the early 1970s which
challenged the notion of women as passive beneficiaries of development. She called for a focus
on Women in Development (WID), to acknowledge the contributions of women’s often invisible
labour. Following frustration with the slow progress of WID, other approaches emerged that
criticised the WID approach as being one of simply ‘add women and stir’. The Women and
Development (WAD) approach emphasised the need for structural changes in the global political
economy.
The Gender and Development (GAD) approach followed, focusing on larger inequities and
unequal relations. GAD advocates called for a deeper understanding of the socially constructed
basis of gender differences and how this impacts on relationships between men and women. They
argued for an improved understanding of power relations and the gendered nature of systems
and institutions which impact on the lives of women and men. Rather than incorporating women
into the current patriarchal system, GAD advocates argued for the transformation of the system
into one characterised by gender equality.
Further, states have continued to call for progress towards gender equality through a
number of international agreements, regional platforms and conferences. At the 1995 4th World
Conference on Women in Beijing, the most influential conference to date, states committed
themselves (in the Beijing Platform for Action) to establishing mechanisms to promote women’s
rights – including national action plans, gender strategies and legal frameworks.
In 2000, states confirmed their commitment to reducing gender inequalities through the
United Nations Millennium Declaration. This was articulated specifically in Millennium
Development Goal (MDG) 3 which called for the promotion of gender equality and women’s
empowerment. Three indicators were chosen to represent this goal: i) the ratios of girls to boys in
primary, secondary and tertiary education; ii) the share of women in wage employment in the non-
agricultural sector; and iii) the proportion of seats held by women in national parliament. Gender
equality is also essential in order to achieve the other seven MDGs. In the post-2015 process to
decide what goals, if any, should follow the MDGs, gender has remained a core concern. Some
advocates have called for a standalone goal on gender, while others have promoted gender
targets within each goal.
While progress has been made to highlight women’s issues and experiences in
development programmes, national laws and political decisions, attention to gender is often
inconsistent. In addition, insufficient funds are allocated to ensure that gender equality is an
important part of these programmes and policies. Many scholars and practitioners argue that the
aim of the ‘gender agenda’ – the transformation of unequal, unjust power relations – has been
largely ignored.

Data on gender

While high quality data is generally difficult to come by in developing countries, it is even
less common that high quality sex-disaggregated data is available. In particular, data related to
women’s contributions in the informal economy, gender-based violence and harmful traditional
practices is very rare. This makes it difficult to fully understand the experiences of women and
men and to ensure that programmes are targeted where they can be most effective. Further, data
disaggregated by age is also infrequently available, making it difficult to understand differences
between women and girls, and men and boys. Some research and evaluations of development
programmes have relied on qualitative data rather than quantitative data. This reliance is criticised
by some groups as not being rigorous enough.
It is important to acknowledge, however, that gender- and age-disaggregation of data is
only the first step. Data and analysis of the power differentials or underlying causes for these
differences is also needed. Ideally, what is required is a mix of quantitative and qualitative data
and analysis that presents evidence of what the differences are and why those differences exist.
Gender relations and status in the household

Gender relations are upheld by both informal and formal institutions. Informal institutions are
usually referred to as “long-lasting codes of conduct, norms, traditions […] that contribute to
gender inequality in all spheres of life” (Branisa et al 2009, cited in Jones et al 2010, p. 10).
Formal institutions (economic, political, legal and social) include political systems and labour
markets. These two spheres interact with local cultures to determine gender outcomes. Social
institutions that have been identified as particularly negative for women and girls include
discriminatory family codes, son bias, physical insecurity, limited resource rights and
entitlements, and cultural restrictions on women’s movement and other liberties (Jones et al
2010). Formal institutions can have both intended and unintended negative impacts on
women. For example, laws, such as Shariah, which specifically state that a man’s and a
woman’s witness are of different value have an intended discriminatory effect. A policy which
requires land titles as a precondition for receiving agricultural credit may have the unintended
effect of excluding women because land ownership is generally concentrated among male
family members. Allowing for the placement of two names (a husband’s and wife’s) on land
titles could help to address this problem.

Gender relations through the lifecycle

Gender dynamics and relations change throughout the course of the lifecycle. Status in the
household is often determined by age, marriage, number of children, disability, economic
resources and educational level attained. Girls, including adolescent girls, often have the lowest
status in the household, especially in societies where families need to pay dowry and where the
daughters are sent to live with the husband’s family upon marriage. Recent research has
identified adolescent girls as particularly vulnerable and susceptible to gender-based
discrimination including sexual violence, forced and early marriage, dropping out of school and
risk of death during childbirth. Early marriage and early pregnancy can have adverse affects on
girls’ health, and may inhibit their ability to take advantage of educational and job opportunities.
Daughters-in-law and unmarried women are also considered to have low status in some
cultures as they are seen as outsiders or burdens on the family. Widows and married women
who have been abandoned by their husbands may also face stigma and lack of status.
Families often choose to invest in boys as the future earners and caretakers of the
family. This enables boys to grow up having higher status in the household than girls and better
income generating opportunities. While status generally increases according to age for both
men and women, it increases disproportionally for men.

Household roles

Household status determines the roles of different family members. Men are often
assumed to be the head of the household and responsible for providing financially for the family,
while women and girls are responsible for household chores, such as caring for children,
cleaning, fetching water and cooking. While women are now increasingly able to take up paid
employment, this often does not involve a reduction in their domestic responsibilities, leading to
the ‘double burden’ of women’s domestic and productive roles. The time required to perform
domestic chores also limits women’s access to paid employment and their participation in civil
society and politics.
While investing in boys’ education is often viewed as a long-term strategy, the pressure
on men to earn money can in some instances lead to boys being taken out of school to help
support the family financially. Girls, on the other hand, are more likely to be taken out of school
because the family is unable to afford their school fees and/or relies on girls to help with
domestic chores and childcare.
Although it is often assumed that households are headed by males, this is not always
the case. In situations of conflict, displacement, labour migration or abandonment, female-
headed households may be more common. These are often among the poorest and most
vulnerable households.
Control over resources and decision-making

While not always the case, men are more commonly the heads of the household and the
breadwinners of the family. This has often translated into men making the family’s financial and
non-financial decisions – such as when daughters get married and to whom, whether the wife
can work outside of the household, whether to use contraception and who gets the most food. In
agricultural societies where women often do most of the work, male family members often own
the land and make the agricultural decisions. Because of women’s lower bargaining position in
the household, their decision-making is often limited and can be confined to childrearing
concerns and domestic tasks. Factors that exacerbate women’s low bargaining positions
include large age gaps between husband and wife, which intensify already existing gender
inequalities, cultural factors that devalue women’s unpaid work, lower levels of education and
economic dependence.
Women have in some instances been able to find ways of negotiating control over
resources and decision making. Women are frequently tasked with budgeting for the household
either through resources provided by the husband or through petty trading and agricultural
labour. In some cases, women are seen as household financial managers. In other cases, while
women may not control the household income, they adopt various strategies to ensure they can
access part of these resources. These may include hiding money and lying about expenditures,
to ensure that they can pay for food and children’s schooling. Interventions aimed explicitly at
strengthening women’s control over resources, such as conditional cash transfers, can be
particularly beneficial.

Intersection of gender and other forms of discrimination

Unequal power relations do not fall only along gender lines. In addition to gender,
individuals can be discriminated against for a number of reasons including ethnicity and race,
religion, caste, age, disability, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and geographic location.
When gender intersects with other axes of marginalisation, women are more likely to experience
multiple layers of discrimination. In some cases, these other forms of discrimination can be
more intense than gender discrimination. An ethnic minority man can be less powerful and more
discriminated against than a middle class woman from a majority ethnic group, although a
female from this same ethnic minority group could face even greater discrimination.
Intersectionality is a tool used to better understand how these discriminations materialise
and intersect. It is based on an understanding that men and women have layered identities
which have resulted from social relations, history and power structures. Through a deeper
appreciation of multiple identities and consequent patterns of discrimination, more effective
responses can be tailored.

Gender analysis and mainstreaming

This paper lays out the Australian government’s strategy for opportunities for all. It develops four
pillars:

 Pillar 1: Advancing equal access to gender-responsive health and education services

 Pillar 2: Increasing women’s voice in decision-making, leadership and peace-building

 Pillar 3: Empowering women economically and improving their livelihood security

 Pillar 4: Ending violence against women and girls at home, in their communities and in
disaster and conflict situations