Informal Institutions and Gender Equality

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Informal Institutions and Gender Equality

• Gita Sen
• Professor, Centre for Public Policy
• Indian Institute of Management
• Bangalore
• Background Paper for the International Seminar on
  Informal Institutions and Development What do
  we know and what can we do? OECD/Development
  Centre, Paris, 11-12 December 2006

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Caveats

• Caveat 1 Difficult to examine FIs and IIs in
  development without a vantage point because all
  institutions result from and are embedded in
  underlying networks of power relations
• Caveat 2 Development practice and practitioners
  are not immune to the above hence
  self-reflexivity is essential

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Caveats

• Caveat 3 We are using gender equality as a
  short-hand to refer to any of gender equality,
  gender equity or womens human rights

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Definitions

• Informal institutions are social norms that
  represent evolved practices with stable rules of
  behaviour that are outside the formal system
• Acceptable behaviour may be governed through a
  set of known sanctions such as honour killings or
  exclusion from a credit fund, AND/OR through
  powerful processes of internalisation

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Definitions

• Formal institutions are those whose norms, rules
  and sanctions are guaranteed through formal
  processes that are usually but not always
  official, and are written and enforceable through
  legal recourse or arbitration
• Can be associated with organisations of state,
  market or civil society.

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Definitions

• Gender discrimination refers to institutions that
  actively discriminate against women, eg.
  Differential minimum wages for women and men,
  requiring women to obtain a mans permission for
  a loan, education, a development programme,
  public services such as contraception or abortion
  
• Gender blindness is non-recognition of the ways
  in which gender power as expressed through
  control over productive assets, division of
  labour, decision-making, physical mobility, voice
  among other factors are biased against women

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Relations between FIs and IIs

• Both FIs and IIs may sometimes be supportive of,
  but can often be harmful to gender equality (or
  equity) ALL societies have them with variations
• Their norms underpin practices such as unequal
  access and control over property, economic assets
  and inheritance, strongly defined gender
  divisions of labour within and outside the home,
  unequal participation in political institutions,
  unequal restrictions on physical mobility,
  sexuality and reproduction, sanctioned violation
  of bodily integrity, accepted codes of conduct
  that condone or reward violence against women

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Relations between FIs and IIs

• Norms reflect gendered relations of power that
  is what makes them so difficult to change, e.g.,
  male versus female dress codes
• Because BOTH FIs and IIs can be
  gender-discriminatory or gender-blind, their
  interactions are more complex than we may
  normally think

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Relations between FIs and IIs

• Not all FIs may be beneficial to women
• Not all IIs may be harmful
• To address IIs, one often has to know about the
  gender implications of FIs
• Following Figure is modified from Helmke and
  Levitskys original figure

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Relations between FIs and IIs

• Key examples IIs oppose gender equality
• Dominant negative institutions (cell 6) passing
  of hudood ordinance by Zia ul Huq in Pakistan in
  1979 recent action by Nicaraguan Senate banning
  abortion under all circumstances action for
  gender equality requires changes in FIs and this
  often requires considerable preparatory political
  work

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Relations between FIs and IIs

• Competing informal institutions (cell 4)
  Indias 73rd Amendments subversion examples from
  Tamilnadu and Gujarat (auctions and samras
  candidates) unenforced Dowry law
• Accomodating informal institutions (cell 2)
  Girls Power Initiative in Calabar Malis energy
  project Karnatakas women workers and child
  marriage

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Relations between FIs and IIs

• Key examples IIs favour gender equality
• Dominant (positive) institutions (cell 5)
  womens credit institutions, pooling mechanisms
  for sharing labour resources, mutual help with
  child-care and care of the sick and old, mutual
  help with water and fuel collection (reciprocity
  and mutual obligation)

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Relations between FIs and IIs

• Substitutive informal institutions (cell 3)
  womens courts (nari adalats) , origins of SEWA
• Complementary informal institutions (cell 1)
  pregnancy ceremony in health programmes

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Womens attitudes to IIs

• Why do women support IIs that appear to work
  against them limit their mobility, reduce their
  life chances, stigmatise and violate them,
  subordinate them within power relations?
• Important to understand this so that policy can
  be nuanced and sensitive
• All reasons linked to underlying power relations

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Womens attitudes to IIs

• Giving in for survival or peace (esp in physical
  mobility, sexuality, reproduction)
• IIs give them status even when painful or
  dangerous (FGM)
• Trade-off loss of agency or control against
  economic support due to weak fallback position

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Womens attitudes to IIs

• Submit to negative norms because it assures
  integration into crucial social networks
• Some IIs may appear stigmatising but may provide
  needed rest also
• Internalisation of norms especially if they hold
  a promised of increased status with age
• Expression of defiance against larger society or
  in solidarity with the community

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Towards more effective policies

• Policy direction 1 Creating alternative formal
  institutions when IIs are harmful to gender
  equality and womens HR
• Often requires political support - strongest
  actors are womens organisations
• Problem of backlash
• Problem of cherry-picking easy reforms or those
  that do not affect the development actors own
  interests

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Towards more effective policies

• Needed support is to local organisations for the
  long haul
• Capacity building among govt officials, judges,
  parliamentarians
• Media work
• Positive examples FGM in Egypt, Pakistans
  hudood ordinance change, abortion law reform in
  Nepal and Colombia

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Towards more effective policies

• Policy direction 2Making existing formal
  institutions more effective
• First gap is poor formulation of the law itself
  example Domestic Violence Bill in India
• Second gap is implementors are themeselves imbued
  with gender bias
• Resistance to gender-equality policies takes the
  forms of trivialisation, dilution, subversion or
  outright resistance (Kabeer and Subrahmanian
  1999)

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Towards more effective policies

• Well-designed monitoring indicators can act as
  signals, constant reminders, measures of
  performance, tool for analysing shortfalls
• Need for awareness building among policy
  implementers and male power-holders rather than
  only focusing IEC on women (eg ICPD and male
  responsibility)

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Towards more effective policies

• Policy direction 3 supporting complementary or
  substitutive informal institutions
• Examples micro-credit risks of FIs distorting
  or taking over and losing the flexibility and
  gender sensitivity of the IIs
• Home(based) work ILO convention 177 only
  ratified by five countries
• Critical questions will support for informal
  institutions let policy-makers off the hook? Will
  IIs with limited potential become enshrined?

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Towards more effective policies

• In all cases, critical importance of engaging
  with women and womens organisations to avoid
  being the policy bull in the gender china shop!