Gender at Work

Theory and Practice for 21st Century Organizations

Aruna Rao, Joanne Sandler, David Kelleher, Carol Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138910027
• eBook ISBN: 9781317437079
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Development
• Index: Business

At a time when some corporate women leaders are advocating for their aspiring sisters to 'lean in' for a bigger piece of the existing pie, this book puts the spotlight on the deep structures of organizational culture that hold gender inequality in place. Gender at Work: Theory and Practice for 21st Century Organizations makes a compelling case that transforming the unspoken, informal institutional norms that perpetuate gender inequality in organizations is key to achieving gender equitable outcomes for all.

The book is based on the authors' interviews with 30 leaders who broke new ground on gender equality in organizations, international case studies crafted from consultations and organizational evaluations, and lessons from nearly fifteen years of experience of Gender at Work, a learning collaborative of 30 gender equality experts. From the Dalit women's groups in India who fought structural discrimination in the largest 'right to work' program in the world, to the intrepid activists who challenged the powerful members of the UN Security Council to define mass rape as a tactic of war, the trajectories and analysis in this book will inspire readers to understand and chip away at the deep structures of gender discrimination in organizational policies, practices and outcomes.

Designed for practitioners, policy makers, donors, students and researchers looking at gender, development and organizational change, this book offers readers a widely tested tool of analysis – the Gender at Work Analytical Framework – to assess the often invisible structures of gender bias in organizations and to map desired strategies and change processes.

1

THE GENDER AT WORK ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK¹

It was a warm, sunny day in January. We were in Bangladesh. We had been asked by BRAC, a large Bangladeshi NGO, to help them improve their capacity to contribute to women’s empowerment and gender equality. The project leader (an external consultant) had convinced BRAC that more was needed than gender training; we needed to affect the organization itself.

That morning, our team of consultants and BRAC staff were sitting at a conference table in Dhaka. This was our first week together and we were beginning to think about what lay ahead. We were wrestling with how to intervene in this organization of 20,000 staff and 1 million beneficiaries. We knew we couldn’t change BRAC one person at a time using a training methodology. We needed ‘organizational levers’. Should we be developing a gender policy? Should we be looking at human resource practices? How could we change norms? Does training do that? BRAC was already delivering a variety of programmes to benefit women (micro-credit, women’s health and para-legal training, for example). How do these factor into our thinking? At the same time, UNICEF had a popular campaign in Bangladesh that featured an empowered young woman comic book character called Meena. This seemed so far from what we were doing; yet everyone was enthusiastic about it.

We needed a conceptual framework to help think about what interventions had transformational potential, how do different efforts work together to lead to change and most importantly, how do we make strategic decisions about how to proceed?

Our thinking about change for gender equality grew through our work with BRAC, a series of informal meetings with colleagues in many countries, an international conference in Canada and a meeting with feminist NGO leaders in India. What evolved from this work was a conception of institutional change that is multifactorial and holistic. It was concerned with the individual psychology of women and men, their access to resources, as well as an examination of the social structures in which they live. Furthermore, our conception was intervention focused – it began from the point of view of an organization attempting to change the norms and structures underlying inequality. This means change must happen in many places. It needs to affect individuals, community and organizational norms and capabilities, and access to resources.

In thinking about change in this way, we came across the work of Ken Wilber. Wilber had been working to integrate the major wisdom traditions (ancient and modern), and had developed a framework for looking at the many aspects of the human condition. His framework was possible because we now have available to us all the major knowledge and wisdom developed through history from different parts of the world. It is possible for us to study everything, from Taoism to systems theory, from Chinese medicine and the mysteries of Qi to modern cognitive science. Wilber’s accomplishment has been to integrate the best of all these traditions in a way that can bring us the deepest possible understanding of human experience (Wilber 1996).

Wilber organizes all this wisdom with two major dimensions as shown in Figure 1.1.

Wilber says that there are two major ways to organize what we know about human existence. First, it is either about individuals or collectives (or systems). Second, we are looking either at the inside, i.e. subjective experience (what we feel or think, for example), or the outside (how things look in an objective way, such as blood pressure readings or opinion poll findings).

FIGURE 1.1 The integral framework

The insight of putting these two dimensions together was very helpful to us. We were well aware of the individual–collective dimension from our work with BRAC and understood immediately how important the second dimension was. We were intrigued by the possibility of organizing our work in a similar way.

As we thought about it, we did three things:

• we kept the individual–collective dimension;

• we changed the other dimension, internal–external to informal–formal;

• we re-thought what the four quadrants would represent in this new configuration so that they represented the four major directions followed by feminist activists for change.

What we subsequently called the ‘Gender at Work Analytical Framework’ has gone through a number of iterations. Our current understanding is shown in Figure 1.2.

The top two quadrants are individual. On the right are changes in noticeable individual conditions such as increased resources, voice, freedom from violence, access to health and education. On the left are individual consciousness and capability such as knowledge, skills, political consciousness and commitment to change toward equality.

The bottom two clusters are systemic. The cluster on the right refers to formal rules as laid down in constitutions, laws and policies. The cluster on the left is the set of informal norms and practices, including those that maintain inequality in everyday practices. Of course this analysis is deeply contextual.

FIGURE 1.2 The Gender at Work Analytical Framework

FIGURE 1.3 The Gender at Work Framework (Inclusion)

Our initial work on the framework was to understand gender inequality and the power relationships between women and men in communities. We have also used the framework to analyse and strategize for change in gender relations within organizations. It is also possible to use the framework to look at issues of inequality beyond gender.

A broader version is shown in Figure 1.3, whereby each quadrant is re-conceived as encompassing a concern for equality that includes all genders. We also acknowledge that we are more than our genders. Our class and race and a variety of other factors also define us. This framework is to help us think more broadly about the injustices that are embedded in difference.

The framework and gender equality

Although the framework can be used to look at broader issues of social inclusion, we have found it helpful to begin with gender as the overwhelming bulk of people we work with identify as either woman or man. However, beginning with gender is only an opening to a broader discussion of how gender and a broad spectrum of gender identities interact with other issues of exclusion such as race, class and religion. Accordingly, we will focus in this section on how the framework has been used to work on gender equality. The framework can be used to look at gender relations in society or a community as well as looking at gender relations inside organizations.

Figure 1.4 illustrates the two dimensions and the four quadrants we work with.

FIGURE 1.4 The Gender at Work Analytical Framework

Quadrant I: individual consciousness and capabilities

This quadrant asks us about the individuals in the organization, community or society. Are they aware of their rights, do they value gender equality, are they willing and capable to take action to make their society more gender equitable? Our understanding of the change process in this quadrant is rooted in the work of Paulo Freire (1981) who envisioned the change process as conscientização, a two-step process of reflection, which allowed people to understand the power relations around them and then take action to transform those relations. This often results in a transformation of the participants’ understanding of their own identity. Women no longer see themselves as victims of an unmoveable system but actors and activists in changing their situation. For example, a young woman in South Africa was working on a manual on sexual harassment for her union and she realized that she could no longer live with an abusive husband, and found the strength to leave him. Similarly, the action of the men in the Gram Vikas men’s groups to change ‘their’ land titles to be joint titles with their wives and encouraging other men to do the same is an example of action on the basis of their evolving beliefs in gender equality.

If we were looking at this quadrant in an organizational analysis, we would be similarly focused on consciousness and capabilities of organizational members and leaders.

Lisa VeneKlasen and Valerie Miller have described the development of consciousness and empowerment among women (2002). They describe a process of movement from acceptance of a subordinate role to self-assertion and an understanding of the social structures that prevent them from claiming their rights. We have also worked with men who came to develop a critical consciousness regarding gender relations, and began to see how gender power relations affected women. The result of this knowledge was a willingness to act in the private or public sphere, or both.

Not all learning in this quadrant is transformational. As we reviewed the cases for this book, it was clear that often there was not transformation but sufficient attitude change to support a change process. In some cases there was enough learning to at least stop resisting change. This is discussed further in Chapter 2.

Quadrant II: resources

The top right-hand quadrant (Quadrant II) is about resources. In the community context, resources refer to such ‘assets’ as women’s access to micro-credit, health and education, or increased security, and freedom from violence. This quadrant has received the bulk of attention of work on gender equality over the years.² There is no doubt that it has needed this attention and there have been impressive gains in such areas as girls’ access to primary education and women’s access to primary health care.

In an organizational analysis we would be looking at the resources available for work on gender equality such as access to leadership, budgets and mechanisms of protection against sexual harassment and violence.

As important as resources are, both for communities and organizations, increased resources may have limited impact on women’s capacity to change or challenge institutional norms regarding their position in the society. For example, many micro-credit programmes were aimed at poverty alleviation but left gender relations untouched (Goetz and Sen-Gupta 1996). On the other hand, the opportunity to hold land titles in their own name changes a fundamental fact of life for women. However, the real issue is not the intervention itself, but where it leads and how it is done. The cases we look at in Chapter 3 illuminate this. For example in the MGNREGA case, Dalit women were able to access opportunities for paid labour, open bank accounts and ultimately challenge local norms regarding their capabilities and even their interest in working outside the home. This is an example of consciousness work in Quadrant I leading to women taking action to claim resources that are rightfully theirs.

Quadrant III: the rules

The bottom right-hand quadrant is the region of formal policies, rules or arrangements. For example, MKSS, an Indian NGO, was able to successfully struggle for a law regarding access to information. The law allowed them to audit whether local officials were giving poor women the full amounts owed them for work on public work projects. Similarly, the Teachers’ Resource Centre, a Pakistani NGO, was able to develop and ha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Gender at Work
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1 The Gender at Work Analytical Framework
• 2 Individual Change: Consciousness and Capability
• 3 Access to Resources: Does it Lead to Strategic Change for Women?
• 4 Ruling out Gender Inequality: Why Good Policies often Fail to be Implemented
• 5 Social Norms and Deep Structures in Organizations
• 6 The Warriors within: Change and the Change Agent
• Conclusion
• Annex: Strategic Learning Partners
• Index