I’m of two minds about gender.

Sometimes I could care less and other times the whole thing makes me really angry.

Why angry?

You can’t do good science if people won’t question status quo.

At a project meeting in Zambia in 2010, there were two presentations on gender. Afterwards, I asked people privately about their views. People had strong private views they were not willing to make public. In the next two slides, I have paraphrased what people said and categorized the different views on gender.

A conspiracy of silence surrounds gender issues.

• Anything that helps us understand our customers better is potentially useful. For example, it might be useful to know how women influence purchase decisions. • We should recognize that our technologies and our interventions can have the unintended consequence of increasing women’s workloads and should be careful to avoid that.

• Gender is something we need to be aware of but it’s not our core business. We would work with local NGOs on gender issues.• Sometimes I think there is too much emphasis on gender. Even within the Foundation.

Strong market view

Soft market view

Cautious view

• Gender research is not relevant. We are selling a product (treadle pumps). Whether men or women buy doesn’t matter.• What’s important is whether or not there is sufficient income to the household. It doesn’t matter who earns as long as expenditures benefit the family unit. • It’s sufficient for us to deliver water to the village. That has benefits for both men and women.

The research is interesting but I struggle to see how to apply it. There is lots of interesting data. What do I do with it?

The best thing we can do for women is get more girls into school and keep them there longer. That and micro credit for women’s self-help groups.

The treadle pump is a gendered technology. In India it is always the man you will see on the treadle pump.

Spell it out for me view

Better approaches view

Gendered technology view

I learned a long time ago to keep my mouth shut when people talk about gender.

I’ll keep my views to myself view

I learned a long time ago to keep my mouth shut when people talk about gender.

I’ll keep my views to myself view

Yes, this was a view expressed by some older white men. It was also a view expressed by some black African women.

Are we asking the right questions?

This is the standard big question: What are the differences between men and women?

That men and women do different things is probably the most obvious and least interesting aspect of gender research.

There must be better questions.

Did gender research take a wrong turn?

Gender mainstreaming was adopted to address the perceived failure of previous strategies such as women-specific projects to bring about significant changes in women’s status. There was widespread consensus that the failure of women-specific projects in the 1970s and 80s was due to their marginalization. Gender mainstreaming was designed to overcome this marginalization and to bring gender equality issues into the core of development activities.[1]

IWMI’s own history is telling: when there was specific gender research, there was output and debate. In the early 2000s, the decision was taken to make it cross-cutting, which became “cutting without the cross”.

Making an issue “cross-cutting” means everyone can ignore it because someone else will look after it. I think the turning point for gender research in the CG system was the Workshop on Gender and Water in September 1997 at Habarana in Sri Lanka.

It’s been downhill ever since.

Does academic debate muddy the waters?

This type of ecofeminism has been criticised for promoting an essentialism that locks women into particular roles and relationships associated with their biology. While spiritual ecofeminists are wont to look to religio-cultural traditions that lie outside the Christian west and which stress the imminence of the divine, particularly the worship of the Goddess including various expressions of ‘Mother Earth’, as evidence for the existence of matriarchal religion, this reasoning has been challenged. Moreover, some critics have argued that spiritual ecofeminism is actually a reflection of ‘white’ feminist religiosity: the confluence of a romanticised post-materialist environmentalism with modern styles of ‘deregulated’ feminist spirituality (Smith, 1997).

This is typical of the discourse:

Please translate into plain English.

Do we have enough toolkits yet?

“In hindsight I agree that being kept busy with toolkits or gender performance indicators distracted, in the end, from .communicating the point in the most convincing way ….” BVK

Do we have enough toolkits yet?

Can research be value free? Let’s look at Gender Mainstreaming: Making it Happen. International Center for Research on Women. Mehra, Rekha and Geeta Rao Gupta. 2006.

6. An Alternate Approach Refocusing gender mainstreaming on operations, based on the experiences cited above, requires adopting a quite different approach from the one employed so far.

Sounds good so

far.

Can research be value free? The conclusions:

“It is important to get results on the ground because such success is motivating and helps to lower organization resistance.”

“Once an opportunity for gender mainstreaming in operations has been identified, it is important to have a systematic and sustained approach to allocate sufficient financial resources, employ gender expertise and show results.”

“An instrumental approach that focuses on operations can yield intrinsic benefits for women.”

How exactly is this new of alternative in any way?

Can research be free of context?

Across the globe, people are choosing to have fewer children or none at all. Governments are desperate to halt the trend, but their influence seems to stop at the bedroom door. Are some societies destined to become extinct? Hardly. It's more likely that conservatives will inherit the Earth. Like it or not, a growing proportion of the next generation will be born into families who believe that father knows best.

If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance.” So proclaimed the Roman general, statesman, and censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus Macedonicus, in 131 B.C. Still, he went on to plead, falling birthrates required that Roman men fulfill their duty to reproduce, no matter how irritating Roman women might have become. "Since nature has so decreed that we cannot manage comfortably with them, nor live in any way without them, we must plan for our lasting preservation rather than for our temporary pleasure."

Gender is one of the basic organizing principles of society. You can’t mess about with gender and not make value judgments. To pretend otherwise is dangerous.

Here is a context: Another context:

Are we challenging basic assumptions?

“While women constitute a considerable portion of the farm decision makers in many parts of the world, they continue to be excluded from irrigation decision making bodies.” Maybe women

don’t want to be “involved” in some things?

Cecile Jackson was an early proponent of the concept of ‘agency’ in the study of women’s roles, and one of the few who continue to treat women as, “fully acting subjects and as actors whose preferences and action are capable of subverting both progressive and regressive social change.”

From: Gender, irrigation and environment: Arguing for agency. 1997. In Gender Analysis and Reform of Irrigation Management: Concepts, Cases, and Gaps in Knowledge. Proceedings of the Workshop on Gender and Water, 15-19 September, 1997, Habarana, Sri Lanka. Merrey, D. and Shirish Baviskar (eds.). IWMI. Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Yes, agency again is quite an ‘old topic’ in social science but I guess it got dropped out of the development literature. KS

Last time I checked, there were two genders.

“In short, women themselves absorb and transmit misogynistic values, just as men do. This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier reality of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike.”

From: Half the Sky by Written by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn, Random House Inc.

Could we do gender differently?

Mainstreaming gender and equity in CPR5 The inclusion of gender as a key analytical variable is a good science. It will provide more detailed knowledge and insights into farming systems and practices, technology adoption rates, extension methods, and lead to the development of agricultural policies that will be of equal benefit to male and female farmers, fishers and pastoralists.

It has long been recognized that women are central actors in agricultural production but that most have unequal access to land, technology, credit, education and other resources, due to prevailing cultural norms, which are often reinforced by legal instruments. Figure 3.1 illustrates five key areas of agricultural research that can be, and usually are, strongly impacted by gender. Men and women have different levels of access to all of these resources but there are also big differences among men and among women depending on their social class, caste, wealth, level of education.

Figure 3.1 Gender differentials in rural livelihoods

CRP5 recognizes that a rethinking of approaches is necessary to ensure that the rural poor gain adequate access to and input into the development of science and technology-based applications aimed at making their work easier. Women farmers should be seen as the

Same old

rhetoric.

Why don’t we try something completely different?

• Take a close look at our assumptions about the role of gender in agriculture. Are we looking at “a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women”? Does it follow that women have no influence because they don’t hold positions in formal water management mechanisms? What do we know about the ways women exert their influence?

• How do men and women together absorb and transmit misogynistic values? How can men and women together rewrite the rules?

•Times have changed. Perhaps it is time to revisit women-specific projects rather than making gender “in addition to…”.

•Take a position on gender. Gender is a fundamental structuring principle of society. We cannot address gender issues without affecting cultural change. We cannot do anything worthwhile by maintaining a pseudo-objective, value free “scientific” position.

•Situate our research in the context of historical and current global movements in feminism. Look at the work of Indonesian Islamic scholar Nasaruddin Umar. Her work is reported to be, “at the forefront of a reform movement from within Islam that aims at giving women equal status.” Or Mai Yamani, author of Feminism and Islam, or scores of other non-western feminist writers.

Approach NGOs, foundations, women’s groups, and ask”

“We have all this data. Is there anything here that you can use?

“We are doing all these research projects? What data could we collect that would be useful to you?

What do you think?