Feminist Visions of Development

Gender Analysis and Policy

Cecile Jackson, Ruth Pearson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415157902
• eBook ISBN: 9781134727124
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

In the wake of the 4th World Conference on Women this volume brings together leading gender and development scholars who interrogate the last twenty years of work in this area.
Feminist Visions of Development throws fresh light on key issues including:
* gender and the environment
* education
* population
* reproductive rights
* industrialisation
* macroeconomic policy
* poverty.
Inspired by recent feminist theoretical work, it re-examines previous structural analysis and opens the way for further research in the field.

Part I
INTERESTS, IDENTITIES AND STRATEGIES

1
WHO NEEDS [SEX] WHEN YOU CAN HAVE [GENDER]?

Conflicting discourses on gender at Beijing

Sally Baden and Anne Marie Goetz

Introduction

For academics working in the gender and development (GAD) field, the concept of ‘gender’ is everyday currency. In the UK, at least, social relations of gender analysis, with its roots in socialist feminism, is a major foundation for GAD thinking (Young et al., 1981; Razavi and Miller, 1995a: 27–32). Understanding the concept of ‘gender’ in the context of social relations analysis remains a touchstone of gender and development research, teaching and training in many institutions in the UK and elsewhere. However, outside of academia, within policy and activist arenas, the utility and relevance of ‘gender’ has been highly contested. Indeed, in some policy applications, ‘gender’ has come to lose its feminist political content. This chapter explores conflicting discourses on the relevance and meaning of gender in policy and activist contexts. We draw on debates over ‘gender’ aired at the NGO (non-government organisation) Forum of the United Nations (UN) Fourth World Conference on Women, in Huairou, China, in September 1995.¹ This conference provided an extraordinary opportunity to investigate a vast range of contemporary policy and activist discourses, given the very broad spectrum of interest groups represented there.

The first section of this chapter is inspired by the challenge to GAD from grassroots development workers and women activists in the South. This challenge is linked to the current debate over the institutionalisation of gender in development policy and practice, and relates to the perceived depoliticisation of the concept of gender. The second part explores a completely different critique of ‘gender’ from conservative groups, who attacked ‘gender’ during the Beijing process on the grounds that it is an over-radical and unrepresentative approach to thinking about social relations. We consider the ways the conservative critique illuminates contradictions and lacunae in feminist theorising about gender. Underlying both sections are questions about what happens to feminist concepts in activist and policy arenas and about our own role in this process, as gender and development researchers.

The mainstreaming agenda

The Beijing Conference reflected the extent to which gender issues have entered the ‘mainstream’, at least at the level of rhetoric. The entire range of bilateral and multilateral development agencies and institutions vied to display their gendersensitivity with a range of policy documents and promotional literature as well as presence at workshops and on panels at both official and NGO events. For example, the World Bank launched its analytical framework Toward Gender Equality: The Role of Public Policy; while the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) proferred the 1995 Human Development Report focusing on gender.

In the 1990s, ‘mainstreaming’ has become a dominant theme in gender and development policy circles. Mainstreaming evolved from the earlier call for the ‘integration’ of women in development, dating back to the 1970s. It arose following the Nairobi UN Women’s Conference in 1985, in part reflecting the perceived failure of national women’s machineries, many set up in the 1970s and early 1980s, to achieve significant results or influence over government policy. Mainstreaming signifies a push towards systematic procedures and mechanisms within organisations—particularly government and public institutions—for explicitly taking account of gender issues at all stages of policy-making and programme design and implementation. It also represents a call for the diffusion of responsibility for gender issues beyond small and underfunded women’s units to the range of sectoral and technical departments within institutions (Razavi and Miller, 1995b).

Mainstreaming has been heavily promoted within international development circles by gender policy advocates in a relatively small group of bilateral agencies, sometimes leading to accusations of a donor driven agenda. It has also been argued that the mainstreaming agenda focuses on process and means rather than ends, leading to a preoccupation with the minutiae of procedures at all levels, rather than clarity or direction about goals (Razavi and Miller, 1995b). Feminist (or radical and Marxist) critiques of bureaucracies and their potential for promoting women’s interests—or indeed those of any other disempowered social group—are not new although they have only relatively recently filtered into the GAD field (Staudt, 1990; Razavi and Miller, 1995b; Goetz, 1995). Echoing these critiques, disquiet about the mainstreaming agenda and the way in which the GAD discourse is evolving was in evidence at the NGO Forum in Huairou, from both the Left and the Right.

The Platform for Action of the official conference in Beijing had comprehensively adopted the language of gender and, specifically, of gender mainstreaming. In the final chapter on Institutional Arrangements, a commitment was made to ‘promote an active and visible policy of mainstreaming a gender perspective... in the monitoring and evaluation of all policies and programmes’ (United Nations, 1995a: 134). The preoccupation with institutionalisation was also evident in the number of workshops at the Forum (and panels at the official conference in Beijing) which focused on the issue from a variety of perspectives.

One of these, early on in the Forum, was entitled ‘Feminism: From Movement to Establishment’ convened by the Applied Socio-economic Research (ASR) organisation of Pakistan. Nighat Khan, Director of ASR and a panellist at this workshop, argued that gender analysis had become a technocratic discourse, in spite of its roots in socialist feminism, dominated by researchers, policy-makers and consultants, which no longer addressed issues of power central to women’s subordination. She identified factors underlying this shift as the professionalisation and ‘NGOisation’ of the women’s movement and the consequent lack of accountability of ‘gender experts’ to a grassroots constituency. A more radical perspective on the Beijing process and associated discourse on gender came from the Revolutionary Women of the Philippines, whose pamphlet The Gender Trap: An Imperialist Scheme for Coopting the World’s Women, attacked gender mainstreaming as a scheme to buy off once committed activists (Makibaka, 1995:5).

Nighat Khan asserted that the focus on gender, rather than women, had become counter-productive in that it had allowed the discussion to shift from a focus on women, to women and men and, finally, back to men. This latter point was echoed by others at the NGO Forum. Eudine Barriteau, presenting on a panel for Development Alternatives with Women in a New Era (DAWN), described how in Jamaica the shift in discourse from women to gender had resulted, in policy circles, in a focus away from women, to ‘men at risk’, reflecting concern about men’s failure in education and in securing employment, while women perform much better educationally and many support families alone.

This view is also reflected in other accounts. A Bangladeshi development worker is quoted by Kabeer as saying: ‘Do you think we are ready for gender in development in Bangladesh when we have not yet addressed the problems of women in development?’ It transpired that ‘the new vocabulary of gender was being used in her organisation to deny the very existence of women specific disadvantage and hence the need for specific measures which might address this disadvantage’ (1994: xii). According to Razavi and Miller, in their recent review of conceptual shifts in the women and development discourse:

Although the gender discourse has filtered through to policy-making institutions, in the process actors have re-interpreted the concept of gender to suit their institutional needs. In some instances, ‘gender’ has been used to side-step a focus on ‘women’ and on the radical policy implications of overcoming their disprivilege.

(1995a:41)

Mainstreaming in research: from subordination to disaggregation

The contradictions generated by mainstreaming resonate closer to home. As gender has become a more mainstream and therefore more respectable and fundable field of research, new players are entering the field, who bear no allegiance to feminist research and may not even have any familiarity with its basic texts, concepts and methodologies. Economists, statisticians and econometricians (many, though not all of them, men), responding to the growth in demand from major development bureaucracies for research and analysis to inform their new ‘gender-aware’ policy directions, have taken up research into gender issues. This recent body of research has tended to look at gender as an interesting statistical variable although certainly not a defining or universally relevant one (e.g. Appleton et al., 1990; Haddad, 1991). Elson (1995) refers to this as ‘the gender-disaggregation approach’. Drawing heavily on the neoclassical economic paradigm, it tends to a static and reductionist definition of gender as (woman/man)—stripping away consideration of the relational aspects of gender, of power and ideology and of how patterns of subordination are reproduced. To the extent that such approaches do consider the factors underlying gender disadvantage or inequality, they tend to look to information problems (e.g. women’s tendency to follow female role models), or to ‘culture’ (defined as outside the purview of mainstream economics) as explanatory factors (see Lockwood, 1992 on Collier, for example). While such research may be of great interest and can provide invaluable insights and empirical evidence, it can underspecify the power relations maintaining gender inequalities, and in the process, de-links the investigation of gender issues from a feminist transformatory project.

Bureaucratic requirements for information tend to strip away the political content of information on women’s interests and reduce it to a set of needs or gaps, amenable to administrative decisions about the allocation of resources. This distillation of information about women’s experiences is unable to accommodate or validate issues of gender and power. Women are separated out as the central problem and isolated from the context of social and gender relations. Furthermore, bureaucracies tend to privilege certain kinds of information perceived as relevant to dominant development paradigms and attribute significance to information in proportion to the perceived social and political status of the informer. Thus, the information provided by Western feminists has tended to get a better hearing than the perspectives of Southern women (Goetz, 1994). It now appears that the quantitative expertise of male economists on gender is gaining increasing weight as the discourse becomes more technocratic, with the danger that in-depth, qualitative, feminist research may be devalued. The Beijing Conference itself saw the production of several compendia of gender-disaggregated data, including a new edition of The World’s Women produced by the UN Statistical Office (UN, 1995b) and the UNDP’s Human Development Report (UNDP, 1995). This latter featured two new indices—the Gender Disparity Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). The GEM is an interesting departure in that it attempts to establish a universal index by which ‘empowerment’ (a highly culturally loaded concept) can be measured and compared between countries, based on a composite of measures of income, participation in professional and managerial jobs and formal political participation.² It is especially ironic that the rhetoric of grassroots, collective, bottom-up development (‘empowerment’) is invoked to name a topdown and universalising statistic.

This is not to say that quantitative data or analysis of gender issues is not valuable. One key victory at Beijing was the successful campaign for the Platform of Action to include a commitment to the valuation of women’s unpaid labour in satellite national accounts, making concrete a long-standing feminist rallying cry. In this case, an organised feminist campaign was able to exploit the increasing sophisitication of gender-disaggregated statistics and of statistical method in general.

Advocacy and accuracy: lies, damned lies and gender statistics

As feminist researchers we felt it important in the build-up to Beijing to forge alliances with activists and campaigners within NGOs and women’s organisations, who are attempting to change the policies of public institutions. This proved challenging, in a number of ways. Specifically, it highlighted our distance from the language used in the lobbying process, in both its conceptual underpinnings and style: our proclivity for academic rigour, complexity and critique seemed at times to be in direct opposition to the demands of consensus building, political utility, and direct campaigning messages.

A couple of examples illustrate the point. We are all familiar with the claim that ‘Women [account] for two-thirds of all working hours, receive only onetenth of the world income and own less than one percent of world property’ (UN, 1980, cited in Duley and Edwards, 1986:48). It has recently come to light that the figure was made up by someone working in the UN because it seemed to her to represent the scale of gender-based inequality at the time.³ It has since been taken up and repeated endlessly, to the point of becoming a cliché, as a justification for attention to gender inequality in access to resources. The point is that, while highly effective as an advocacy slogan (still in circulation 15 years on!), the claim had no basis and thus had the potential to backfire and discredit feminist research. In the context of ‘mainstreaming’, such slogans may have little credibility.⁴

Nevertheless, similarly dubious statistical claims continue to be made by activists and gender advocates in order to justify attention to women. DAWN’s position paper for the Beijing Conference asserts that ‘Women world-wide produce half of the world’s food, constitute 70 per cent of the world’s 1.3 billion absolute poor and own only 1 per cent of the world’s land’ (DAWN, 1995:6). Throughout the conference, the ‘feminisation of poverty’ featured prominently as a topic of discussion and as a justification for channelling resources to poor women. The Platform of Action features a chapter on the ‘persistent and increasing burden of poverty on women’ which specifically refers to the ‘feminisation of poverty’, and identifies female-headed households as a particularly vulnerable group in this context (UN, 1995a:21).

At the conference, we distributed a briefing paper on gender and poverty reduction strategies, which, drawing on recent work in the GAD field (Jackson, 1996; see also Chapter 2 by Jackson in this volume) questioned the growing orthodoxy on the feminisation of poverty and, specifically, the claim that rising female headship is responsible for this.⁵ But other critics of the ‘feminisation of poverty’ at Beijing tended to be those on the religious right who viewed the association with female headship and the resulting demands for resources to be channelled to lone women as a threat to family values. Thus, we found ourselves going against the tide of the advocacy effort in rather unwholesome company.

Instrumentalism and opportunism

Activists, lobbyists and gender policy advocates working within institutions have adopted a variety of strategies to influence institutional agendas and bring about ‘mainstreaming’, often resorting to instrumental arguments to convince hardened bureaucrats of the need to address gender issues. Common instrumental arguments used are the need to invest in female education to serve population control and child welfare goals (see Jeffery and Jeffery, Chapter 11 in this volume), or the importance of women’s participation in community organisations to improve service provision and assist anti-poverty efforts. Such arguments appear justified to get gender issues on the table in organisations whose mandate and goals do not embrace social justice or equity. The World Bank’s recent policy document for Beijing, for example, makes the case for gender almost entirely on efficiency grounds, constructing a convergence between the interests of women and the promotion of economic liberalisation: ‘Sound economic policies and well functioning markets are essential for growth, employment and the creation of an environment in which the returns to investing in women and girls can be fully realised’ (World Bank, 1995:5).

Instrumental arguments, while they may prove successful in raising gender issues, are problematic in that they often result in women or gender being simply a means to other ends. Further, they run the risk of being discredited. Tenuous evidence on the relationships between female education and fertility decline, or female education and productivity, can be easily challenged, weakening the justification for addressing gender issues, with a danger that resources will be withdrawn. Finally, the use of instrumental arguments fails to recognise the gendered nature of institutions themselves: information or the right arguments will not in themselves produce change. Institutional structures, rule and cultures, including the ways in which information is collected, processed and prioritised, reflect dominant gender interests, so that the pursuit of gender equity must include demands for organisational change.

Mainstreaming: the depoliticisation of gender?

The ambivalence about—or even hostility towards—the GAD discourse expressed by some Southern women activists at Beijing perhaps reflects deeper anxieties about the imposition of what is perceived as an external agenda and about whose interests are served by the mainstreaming project. This is underlined by the lack of accountability of Northern development agencies to the Southern women in whose interests they claim to be acting. While Northern feminist groups can lobby their governments, albeit with limited effect, the responses of Southern women to policy decisions taken in Washington or London have not until recently formed part of the ‘feedback loop’ characteristic of pluralist politics (Jaquette and Staudt, 1988).⁶

The variety of ways in which ‘gender’ has come to be institutionalised and operationalised in the development arena presents a contradictory and ironic picture. There is a disjuncture between the feminist intent behind the term and the ways in which it is employed such as to minimise the political and contested character of relations between women and men. A problem with the concept of ‘gender’ is that it can be used in a very descriptive way and the question of power can easily be removed. In order to bring power back into gender, feminists...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction: Interrogating Development
• Part I: Interests, Identities and Strategies
• Part II: Households and Industry
• Part III: Money and Markets
• Part IV: Population and the Environment