Session 3: Policy Approaches to Women and Gender Equality

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Session 3Policy Approaches to Women and Gender
Equality
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Welfare approach

• earliest approach, predominant 1950-1970.
• to bring women into the development as better
  mothers.
• women are seen as the passive beneficiaries of
  development emphasizing their reproductive role
• seeks to meet practical gender needs in that role
  through a top-down handouts of food aid, measures
  against malnutrition and family planning
• not challenging, esp of GDOL, and therefore still
  widely popular.

Source March, C., Smyth, I., and Mukhopahhyay,
M. (1999). A Guide to Gender Analysis Frameworks.
Oxfam Oxford
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Equity approach

• original WID approach, emerged during in the
  76-85 UN Womens Decade, within the predominant
  growth with equity development approach
• to gain equity for women who are seen as active
  participants in development
• recognises the triple role, and seeks to meet
  strategic gender needs by direct state
  intervention giving political and economic
  autonomy and reducing inequality with men.
• challenges womens subordinate position
• criticised as western feminism, is considered
  threatening to men and is unpopular with
  governments.

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Anti- Poverty approach

• 2nd WID approach, a toned-down version of equity,
  from 1970s onwards in the context of Basic Needs
  approaches to development
• women seen as disproportionately represented
  among poor
• to ensure that poor women increase their
  productivity
• womens poverty is seen as a problem of
  underdevelopment, not of subordination
• recognises the productive role of women, and
  seeks to meet their practical to earn an income,
  particularly in small scale income generation
  projects
• still most popular with NGOs

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Efficiency approach

• 3rd and now predominant WID approach, adopted
  particularly since the 1980s debt crisis.
• to ensure that development is more efficient and
  effective through womens economic contribution,
  with participation often equated with equity and
  decision making
• seeks to meet PGNs while relying in all three
  roles and an elastic concept of womens time
• women seen in terms of their capacity to
  compensate for declining social services by
  extending their working day
• very popular approach

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Empowerment

• most recent approach, articulated by third-world
  women
• to empower women through greater self-reliance
• explicitly acknowledges centrality of power and
  womens need for more power to improve position
• womens subordination is expressed in terms of
  male oppression and colonial and neo-colonial
  oppression
• recognises the triple role seeks to meet SGIs
  indirectly thru grassroots mobilisation of PGNs
• potentially challenging, but its avoidance of
  western feminism makes it unpopular except with
  third world womens NGOs.

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Gender mainstreaming

• Women in Development to gender and development
• some improvements in womens material conditions,
  but little in their status
• women remained marginalized from mainstream
  development, mainly due to how WID was
  implemented the establishment of womens
  national machineries and WID units and the
  emphasis on womens projects
• integrating women to mainstreaming gender
• relates to the second problem associated with
  WID, the continued marginalization of women and
  womens issues
• mainstreaming was seen as a way of promoting
  gender equity in all of the organizations
  pursuits

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Gender mainstreaming

• associated with the 1995 World Conference on
  Women in Beijing and the Beijing Platform of
  Action that signaled the UNs first official use
  of the term
• call for gender mainstreaming seems to have
  been a culmination of two inter-related changes
  in discourse prior to Beijing
• Women in Development to gender and development
• integrating women to mainstreaming gender

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The purpose of gender mainstreaming

• Gender mainstreaming is a strategy to get
  development organisations to promote gender
  equality
• It is not an end in itself

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Definitions

• Mainstreaming has two mains aspects
• Integration of gender equality concerns into the
  analyses and formulation of all policies,
  programmes and projects
• Initiatives to enable women as well as men to
  formulate and express their views and participate
  in decision-making across all development issues
  (OECD-DAC, 1998)

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Integrationist or Agenda-setting?

• integrationist builds gender issues within
  existing development paradigms
• agenda-setting implies the transformation of the
  existing development agenda with a gender
  perspective. (Jahan, 199513).

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Gender Mainstreaming key Elements

• Developing policies and plans
• Leadership, Commitment and Accountability
• Advocates
• Support mechanisms

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Gender Policies

• What is most noted is the nature of the policies
  adopted and the quality or lack of implementation
  or policy evaporation
• Some agencies have adopted integrationist
  policies, some transformatory ones (e.g.,
  UNDP), some have had WID and/or gender equality
  as part of their policies for some time e.g.,
  ILO since 1919, FAO since 1949 , the Danish NGO,
  MS, since 1981

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Leadership

• leadership is discussed in a least three
  respects
• organizational
• management (i.e., lower level managers)
• change leadership (e.g., gender advocates)
• But mostly in terms quantity (more leadership)
  not quality

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Commitment

• Commitment is also discussed in a number of
  respects leadership, management, staff
• Policies are paper commitments that need to be
  translated into action and the allocation of
  sufficient resources, human, as well as
  financial.

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Accountability

• Gender policies are perceived as optional due to
  their invisibility, particularly, among senior
  and line management
• There is a lack of incentives and disincentives
  to follow organizational gender policies, systems
  and procedures

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Gender Mainstreaming Advocates

• usually refer to external organizations or
  internal staff that take on the job of getting
  gender on the agenda and keeping it there
• one of the most recurring elements and, for some,
  the most critical (Harrison, 1997)

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Support for Gender Mainstreaming

• challenges to gender mainstreaming are often seen
  as lack of capacity resulting from lack of
  knowledge (know-how) and supporting resources
• fundamental lack of understanding of the
  conceptual and practical links between poverty
  reduction and gender equality (including human
  rights)
• a lack of conceptual clarity about gender
  mainstreaming (e.g., its a goal or just about
  staff gender parity, or womens projects) as well
  as a lack of know-how.
• hence gender training, experience sharing and
  tools/guidelines are most commonly recommended