Message 37: Shiney Varghese
I too have just caught up with this e-mail discussion; thank you all, especially Juana Vera, Violet Matiru, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Margreet Zwartveen, Deepa Joshi and Elizabeth Zachariah for your thought-provoking contributions.
First of all I want to reiterate the concern about 'the dilution and co-option of principles of gender equality in their transformation in development practice', (raised by Deepa Joshi and Elizabeth Zachariah). Such co-option can vary from appointing a few women as gender specialists (whose only qualification is that they are women) on a project to satisfy funder requirement, to defining gender mainstreaming as having quantifiable indicators to prove women's participation, without any attention to the quality of participation. This is where I would agree with Thierry Facon that it is important to be concerned about results.
Having said that, the result we look for will depend on the goals we define.
As Deepa Joshi points out, there are 2 distinct but inter-related goals of gender mainstreaming: First the technical aspects of integrating gender in organizational policies, programmes and projects, including promoting women's participation and second the transformative agenda which calls for a redistribution of power, resources and opportunities in favour of the marginalized.
Those who promote women’s involvement in an attempt to address development efficiency would state the first one as their goal; while feminists and others who prioritize goals of human well being and equity over the dominant efficiency goals of development would think of the second as a primary goal. The latter would think of the first as at best a goal within a particular context/ sector (in this case water management in Agriculture), a goal that might help achieve the transformative agenda.
Especially given the fact that in many instances promotion of "peoples participation" itself has been a strategy to assist in the roll-back of state social responsibilities, especially when one considers the cuts in public sector spending, I would say that if we are attempting gender mainstreaming to achieve only the first goal, it would invariably increase the burden of women, without benefiting them as much.
Even assuming that the "development" is achieved, the resultant situation may remind us all of the situation of women in many developed countries. Much of the discussion of gender mainstreaming occurs in developing country contexts. In my experience, in the developed society too, women tend to play the same/ similar triple roles (except for the occasional use of machines by men for doing laundry and dishes), but this patriarchal society has found a better language -- here women play these roles out of "choice". However, the reasons are not traced to either social conditioning of both genders or to the institutional barriers.
The implication of limiting gender mainstreaming only for `development’ context (and in developing countries) is that we are confining ourselves to the first goal and thereby going along with a northern/funder driven agenda. (In my experience, most funders are interested primarily in the first goal (in an institutional sense), even when they pay lip service to the latter). For achieving the second goal, these discussions on gender mainstreaming should happen also in the "developed country" contexts, not just in the context of developing countries.
Shiney Varghese
