Looking at some unchallenged assumptions in gender issues in agricultural development.

1. I’m of two minds about
gender.
Sometimes I could care less
and other times the whole
thing makes me really angry.
Why angry?

2. You can’t do good science if people won’t question status quo.

3. A conspiracy of silence
surrounds gender issues.
At a project meeting in Zambia in 2010, there were two presentations
on gender. Afterwards, I asked people privately about their views.
People had strong private views they were not willing to make public.
In the next two slides, I have paraphrased what people said and
categorized the different views on gender.

4. • Gender research is not relevant. We are selling a product
(treadle pumps). Whether men or women buy doesn’t matter. Strong market view
• What’s important is whether or not there is sufficient income
to the household. It doesn’t matter who earns as long as
expenditures benefit the family unit.
• It’s sufficient for us to deliver water to the village. That has
benefits for both men and women.
• Anything that helps us understand our customers better is
potentially useful. For example, it might be useful to know how
Soft market
women influence purchase decisions. view
• We should recognize that our technologies and our
interventions can have the unintended consequence of
increasing women’s workloads and should be careful to avoid
that.
• Gender is something we need to be aware of but it’s not our Cautious view
core business. We would work with local NGOs on gender
issues.
• Sometimes I think there is too much emphasis on gender. Even
within the Foundation.

5. The research is interesting but I struggle to see
Spell it out for me
how to apply it. There is lots of interesting
view
data. What do I do with it?
The best thing we can do for women is get
Better approaches
more girls into school and keep them there
view
longer. That and micro credit for women’s self-
help groups.
The treadle pump is a gendered technology. In Gendered
India it is always the man you will see on the technology view
treadle pump.
I learned a long time ago to keep my mouth I’ll keep my views
shut when people talk about gender. to myself view

6. I learned a long time ago to keep my mouth I’ll keep my views
shut when people talk about gender. to myself view
Yes, this was a view
expressed by some older
white men.
It was also a view
expressed by some black
African women.

7. Are we asking the right questions?
This is the standard big question:
What are the differences between
men and women?
That men and women do different things is
probably the most obvious and least interesting
aspect of gender research.
There must be better questions.

8. Did gender research take a wrong turn?
Gender mainstreaming was adopted to address the
IWMI’s ownissue “cross-cutting” means everyone
Making an history is telling: when such as
perceived failure of previous strategies
there was
specific genderprojects someonewas significant
can ignore it because to bring about output and
women-specific
research, there else will look
debate. Inthinkearlystatus. Theredecision was
after it. I the the 2000s, the was gender
changes in women‟s turning point for widespread
taken to make the failure of women-specific projects
consensusin the CG system waswhich became on
research that it cross-cutting, the Workshop
“cutting without the cross”. to their marginalization.
in the 1970s and 80s in September 1997 at
Gender and Water was due
Gender mainstreaming was designed to overcome
Habarana in Sri Lanka.
this marginalization and to bring gender equality
issues into the core of development activities.[1]
It’s been downhill ever since.

9. Does academic debate muddy the waters?
This is typical of the discourse:
This type of ecofeminism has been criticised for promoting an
essentialism that locks women into particular roles and relationships
associated with their biology. While spiritual ecofeminists are wont to
look to religio-cultural traditions that lie outside the Christian west
and which stress the imminence of the divine, particularly the
worship of the Goddess including various expressions of „Mother
Earth‟, as evidence for the existence of matriarchal religion, this
reasoning has been challenged. Moreover, some critics have
argued that spiritual ecofeminism is actually a reflection of „white‟
feminist religiosity: the confluence of a romanticised post-materialist
environmentalism with modern styles of „deregulated‟ feminist
spirituality (Smith, 1997).
Please translate into plain English.

10. Do we have enough toolkits yet?

11. Do we have enough toolkits yet?
“In hindsight I agree that being kept busy
with toolkits or gender performance
indicators distracted, in the end, from
.communicating the point in the most
convincing way ….” BVK

12. Sounds
Can research be value free? good
Let’s look at Gender Mainstreaming: Making it so far.
Happen. International Center for Research on
Women. Mehra, Rekha and Geeta Rao Gupta. 2006.
6. An Alternate Approach
Refocusing gender mainstreaming on operations,
based on the experiences cited above, requires
adopting a quite different approach from the one
employed so far.

13. Can research be value free?
The conclusions:
“It is important to get results on the ground because such
success is motivating and helps to lower organization
resistance.”
“Once an opportunity for gender mainstreaming in operations
has been identified, it is important to have a systematic and
sustained approach to allocate sufficient financial resources,
employ gender expertise and show results.”
“An instrumental approach that focuses on operations can yield
intrinsic benefits for women.”
How exactly is this new of alternative in any way?

14. If we could survive without a wife, citizens of Rome, all of us would do without that nuisance.” So proclaimed the Roman general, statesman, and censor Quintus Caecilius Metellus
Can research be free of context?
Gender is one of the basic organizing principles of society.
You can’t mess about with gender and not make value
judgments. To pretend otherwise is dangerous.
Here is a context: Another context:
Across the globe, people are choosing to
have fewer children or none at all.
Governments are desperate to halt the
trend, but their influence seems to stop at
the bedroom door. Are some societies
destined to become extinct? Hardly. It's
more likely that conservatives will inherit
the Earth. Like it or not, a growing
proportion of the next generation will be
born into families who believe that father
knows best.

15. Are we challenging basic assumptions?
“While women constitute a
considerable portion of the farm
decision makers in many parts of the
world, they continue to be excluded
from irrigation decision making
bodies.” Maybe women
don’t want to be
“involved” in some
things?

16. Cecile Jackson was an early proponent of the
concept of „agency‟ in the study of women‟s roles,
and one of the few who continue to treat women as,
“fully acting subjects and as actors whose
preferences and action are capable of subverting
both progressive and regressive social change.”
From: Gender, irrigation and environment: Arguing for agency. 1997. In Gender Analysis and
Reform of Irrigation Management: Concepts, Cases, and Gaps in Knowledge. Proceedings of
the Workshop on Gender and Water, 15-19 September, 1997, Habarana, Sri Lanka. Merrey, D.
and Shirish Baviskar (eds.). IWMI. Colombo, Sri Lanka.

17. Yes, agency again is quite an ‘old
topic’ in social science but I guess
it got dropped out of the
development literature. KS

18. Last time I checked, there were two genders.

19. “In short, women themselves absorb and
transmit misogynistic values, just as men
do. This is not a tidy world of tyrannical
men and victimized women, but a messier
reality of oppressive social customs
adhered to by men and women alike.”
From: Half the Sky by Written by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn,
Random House Inc.

20. Could we do gender differently?

21. Mainstreaming gender and equity in CPR5
The inclusion of gender as a key analytical variable is a good science.
It will provide more detailed knowledge and insights into farming
Same systems and practices, technology adoption rates, extension
methods, and lead to the development of agricultural policies that
old will be of equal benefit to male and female farmers, fishers and
pastoralists.
rhetoric. It has long been recognized that women are central actors in
agricultural production but that most have unequal access to land,
technology, credit, education and other resources, due to prevailing
cultural norms, which are often reinforced by legal instruments.
Figure 3.1 illustrates five key areas of agricultural research that can
be, and usually are, strongly impacted by gender. Men and women
have different levels of access to all of these resources but there are
also big differences among men and among women depending on
their social class, caste, wealth, level of education.
Figure 3.1 Gender differentials in rural livelihoods
CRP5 recognizes that a rethinking of approaches is necessary to
ensure that the rural poor gain adequate access to and input into the
development of science and technology-based applications aimed at
making their work easier. Women farmers should be seen as the

22. Why don’t we try something completely different?

23. • Take a close look at our assumptions about the role of gender in
agriculture. Are we looking at “a tidy world of tyrannical men and
victimized women”? Does it follow that women have no influence
because they don‟t hold positions in formal water management
mechanisms? What do we know about the ways women exert their
influence?
• How do men and women together absorb and transmit
misogynistic values? How can men and women together rewrite the
rules?
•Times have changed. Perhaps it is time to revisit women-specific
projects rather than making gender “in addition to…”.

24. •Take a position on gender. Gender is a fundamental structuring
principle of society. We cannot address gender issues without
affecting cultural change. We cannot do anything worthwhile by
maintaining a pseudo-objective, value free “scientific” position.
•Situate our research in the context of historical and current
global movements in feminism. Look at the work of Indonesian
Islamic scholar Nasaruddin Umar. Her work is reported to be, “at
the forefront of a reform movement from within Islam that aims at
giving women equal status.” Or Mai Yamani, author of Feminism
and Islam, or scores of other non-western feminist writers.

25. Approach NGOs, foundations, women‟s groups, and ask”
“We have all this data. Is there anything here that you can use?
“We are doing all these research projects? What data could we
collect that would be useful to you?

26. What do you think?