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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 July 2000 Issue No. 491 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 July 2000 Issue No. 491
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The gender gap
By Mariz Tadros
For a long time, many donors, governments and NGOs could feel pretty smug about their efforts to address discrimination against poor women by fostering all kinds of grassroots projects. But if women's predicament is ever to change, insists Jane Haile, it is the macro-policies that need to be the centre of focus. Haile is a social anthropologist with extensive experience working for UN organisations. Recently in Egypt to train staff at the European Delegation in Cairo, Haile was brought in to coach delegates in being more gender-sensitive in their policy planning.
"People are very often ready to accept gender discrepancies in areas like health and education, but the minute you start taking about macro-economics, people think it is neutral," Haile claims. But there is nothing neutral about World Trade Organisation (WTO) policies and the structural adjustment packages proffered by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Haile insists that data has increasingly shown such policies to affect women and men differently. For example, women usually pay the heaviest price for privatisation programmes and cutbacks in social expenditure, especially since they usually occupy positions in lower-level social services -- the first jobs to go. Because women have traditionally been care providers, they have had to do more work and find more food to compensate for the services that the public sector is no longer providing.
Haile's main argument is that there is no such thing as "gender-neutral" macro-economic policy. Macro-economists, she insists, need to be persuaded that policies such as the promotion of direct foreign investment have an impact on women. "In making clothes and the electronics industry, for example, women have had to accept these jobs because they have no alternatives, despite the fact that they provide them with no security," she said.
Nor do the social "safety nets" put forward to minimise the negative impact on the poor provide any security. Take the case of the extension of small loans to women (microcredit) for income-generating purposes. Haile suggests that while there may be some very good examples of microcredit programmes in Bangladesh, their success is largely because they function on a grassroots level -- from the bottom up.
Haile questions the success of such ventures if they are introduced on a larger, nationwide scale, "when they have a natural limit to their scale." She pauses to reflect on this idea. "In many ways, they replicate what old missionary groups did when they moved in. They offer some spiritual comfort, education and microcredit and a sort of welfare package."
Approaching disparities through a gender, rather than a women-based approach may hold part of the solution. The women in development (WID) approach focusses resources and attention on women, more or less independently of women. A gender and development approach emphasises empowering women and necessitates working with men as well. For Haile, it is much less threatening to the status quo to talk about "women" than it is to talk about "gender", because the latter requires addressing the very power relations that perpetuate disparities between men and women. Practically, this means making the transition from small projects that target women, like giving women crops to grow, to challenging discrimination in legislation -- say, by addressing the question of women's access to land through land reform.
Globally, argues Haile, we have not moved very far in thinking about gender, and it is still confused with WID. Gender blindness -- i.e., not looking closely enough at power relations on both the micro and macro levels and how they impact women in different contexts -- is rampant. Many proposals for development projects stipulate that every effort will be made to ensure that there will be no "gender disparities" or that there is "no discrimination on the basis of gender", but the programme is initially prepared in such a way that men would naturally have better access to its services than women. Vocational training programmes are a case in point. Everything from the content of the training, to the time and place, down to the sex of the instructor -- not to mention whether it has child-care facilities -- could mean that women would just not apply for it and end up being excluded.
Haile believes that the first step toward addressing gender blindness must be on the level of economic reform and structural adjustment packages. Training projects must make people aware of the importance of integrating gender in all programmes from the planning stage and having access to gender-segregated data.
A great deal of data was generated from the Beijing and Social Summit conferences, but because they are tagged as "women's rights issues" it is infrequent that this data is used in development programming. In development agencies work, the line drawn between those who work on following up the recommendations of gatherings like the Beijing Conference and CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women) and groups who work on public works projects like water and sanitation, or social development and education, is very clear.
One of the problems with mainstreaming gender is that at the end of the day, it is that the movement is still led and adopted very much by women. "It is still about women talking to women about women, with little involvement from men," says Haile. For women to avoid "ghettoising" themselves, Haile believes that the only way to push forward is to get gender entirely out of the women's domain and into the macro-picture. That will necessarily require close scrutiny of policies and programmes to ensure that assumptions have not been made about so-called fair playing fields and equal access to services.
