Gender Across Cultres

Key Concepts, terminologies and

Approaches
• Gender Awareness: The recognition of the fact
that life experiences, expectations by society,
and needs of women and men are different,
that they often involve inequality and are
subject to change.
• Can you come up with any incident, event,
news etc that has made you recognize/ be
more aware of gender-based inequalities?

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• Gender Blind: Ignoring or failing to address
the gender dimension (such as the
differences amongst men and women with
regards to their social roles, responsibilities,
capabilities, needs and priorities and social
attitudes towards males and females position
in society).
• Can gender blind policy be gender neutral
in impact?
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• Gender Balance: Having the same (or a sufficient) number
of women and men at all levels within the organization to
ensure equal representation and participation in all areas
of activity and interest.

• Gender Roles: The sets of behaviour, roles and

responsibilities attributed to women and men respectively by
society which are reinforced at the various levels of the
society through its political and educational institutions and
systems, employment patterns, norms and values, and
through the family.

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• Gender sensitizing "is about changing
behavior and instilling empathy into the views
that we hold about our own and the other
gender." It helps people in "examining their
personal attitudes and beliefs and
questioning the realities they thought they
know”.

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 GENDER RELATIONS
• Hierarchical relations of power between women and
men that tend to disadvantage women more than
men.
• These gender hierarchies are often accepted as
‘natural’ but are socially determined relations,
culturally based, and are subject to change over
time. They can be seen in a range of gendered
practices, such as the division of labour and
resources, and gendered ideologies, such as ideas of
acceptable behaviour for women and men.

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 GENDER RELATIONS

• Analyses which focus on gender relations give more

prominence to the connectedness of men’s and
women’s lives, and to the imbalances of power
embedded in male-female relations. They also
emphasize the intersection of gender relations with
other hierarchical social relations such as class, caste,
ethnicity and race.

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• Gender relations constitute and are constituted by a
range of institutions, such as the family, legal
systems or the market. They are a resource which is
drawn on daily to reinforce or redefine the rules,
norms and practices which govern social institutions.
Since historically women have been excluded
from many institutional spheres, or their
participation circumscribed, they often have less
bargaining power to affect change.

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 INTRAHOUSEHOLD RESOURCE
DISTRIBUTION
• The dynamics of how different resources that are
generated within, or which come into the household are
controlled and accessed by its different members.
• Gender analysis has revealed some evidence of bias against
female members of households in the allocation of resources
such as income, food, nutrition, health care and education.
• These patterns are not universal, however, and are also
mediated by other factors such as age, and birth order. For
example, there is little evidence of nutritional bias against girl
children in Sub-Saharan Africa, whereas in South Asia this
pattern has been widely noted.

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 GENDER
DISCRIMINATION
• The systematic, unfavorable treatment of individuals on
the basis of their gender, which denies them rights,
opportunities or resources.
• Across the world, women are treated unequally, and less
value is placed on their lives because of their gender.
Women’s differential access to power and control of
resources is central to this discrimination in all institutional
spheres, i.e. the household, community, market, and state.
• Within the household, women and girls can face
discrimination in the sharing out of household resources
including food, sometimes leading to higher malnutrition and
mortality indicators for women (This is of course subject to
low-income households).
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• At its most extreme, gender discrimination can lead to son
preference, expressed in sex selective abortion or female
feticide.
• In the labour market, unequal pay, occupational exclusion or
segregation into low skill and low paid work limit women’s
earnings in comparison to those of men of similar education
levels.
• Women’s lack of representation and voice in decision
making bodies in the community and the state perpetuates
discrimination, in terms of access to public services, such as
schooling and health care, or discriminatory laws.

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 GENDER DIVISION
OF LABOUR
• The socially determined ideas and practices which define
what roles and activities are deemed appropriate for women
and men.

• Whilst the gender division of labour tends to be seen as

natural and immutable, in fact, these ideas and practices are
socially constructed. This results in context-specific patterns
of who does what by gender and how this is valued.

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• However, roles typically designated as female are almost
invariably less valued than those designated as male.
• Women are generally expected to fulfil the reproductive role
of bearing and raising children, caring for other family
members, and household management tasks, as well as
home-based production.
• Men tend to be more associated with productive roles,
particularly paid work, and market production. In the labour
market, although women’s overall participation rates are
rising, they tend to be confined to a relatively narrow range
of occupations or concentrated in lower grades than men,
usually earning less.

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 WOMEN’S
EMPOWERMENT
• A ‘bottom-up’ process of transforming gender
power relations, through individuals or groups
developing awareness of women’s
subordination and building their capacity to
challenge it.
• The term ‘empowerment’ is now widely used
in development agency policy and programme
documents, in general, but also specifically in
relation to women.
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• Central to the concept of women’s empowerment is an
understanding of power itself. Women’s empowerment
does not imply women taking over control previously held by
men, but rather the need to transform the nature of power
relations.
• Power may be understood as:
• ‘power within,’ or self confidence,
• ‘power with’, or the capacity to organize with others towards
a common purpose, and
• the ‘power to’ effect change and take decisions, rather than
‘power over’ others.

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• Empowerment is sometimes described as
being about the ability to make choices, but
it must also involve being able to shape
what choices are on offer.

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• Planners working towards an empowerment approach must
therefore develop ways of enabling women themselves to
critically assess their own situation and shape a transformation
in society. The ultimate goal of women’s empowerment is
for women themselves to be the active agents of change
in transforming gender relations.

• For example measuring women’s empowerment, particularly in

relation to microcredit programmes.

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 The GAD approach
• The GAD (or Gender and Development)
approach to development policy and practice
focuses on the socially constructed basis of
differences between men and women and
emphasizes the need to challenge existing
gender roles and relations.

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 GAD
• GAD emerged from a frustration with the lack of progress of
WID policy, in changing women’s lives and in influencing the
broader development agenda.
• GAD: women’s ‘real’ problem as the imbalance of power
between women and men.
• GAD approaches generally aim to meet both women’s
practical gender needs and more strategic gender needs by
challenging existing divisions of labour or power relations.

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• The integration of gender into development policies and programming have
to date primarily only included programming by women for women. It was
born out of the original women in development movement which focused
mainly on women’s economic contribution to society and challenged
inequalities in access to the workplace. The women in development
movement highlighted the productive work that women undertake in many
societies and challenged development policy that only focused on men’s
productive work and women as receivers of care and benefits. However, the
gaps in this approach soon became evident, as it failed to change women’s
place in society and the power relations between men and women. This led
to the ideological shift from women in development to gender and
development in order to better represent the wider focus on gender relations
between men and women. However, having made the ideological shift to
gender and development, men’s gender and their gendered experiences
as men remained invisible in policies and programmes to improve the
lives of people in developing countries.

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 Practical (PGNs) and Strategic
Gender Needs (SGNs)
• To address a practical gender need is to improve a person's
situation by widening her or his access to resources.
• For example, a woman's situation will be made easier if she
doesn't have to walk long distances to fetch water or take her
children to the health center. Similarly, a man's situation will
be made easier if building poles or thatching materials are
closer to hand - or if he acquires transport to fetch them.
• However, such improvements will not directly affect their roles
and relationships, or their control. They are purely 'practical'
matters.

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• Those changes that really empower people
are called 'strategic' ones.
• If a woman learns more about her rights
regarding inheritance, for example, this is
addressing her strategic needs. Her
relationships - and her position - will thus be
improved.

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• In general, practical gender needs are likely to be related to survival -
through the provision of food, shelter, clothing, or health care. Small-scale
women's projects fit into this category in as much as they directly impact on
a family's welfare, without relieving the woman of her domestic chores or
drastically changing her life.
• Addressing strategic gender needs, on the other hand, can empower
women by challenging and changing their, subordination and
marginalisation. The outcome can involve a re-division of labour, or the
end of discriminatory practices. They vary according to particular contexts,
related to gender divisions of labour, power and control, and may include
such issues as legal rights, domestic violence, equal wages, etc. Other
outcomes could be the accumulation of skills or an increase in the
beneficiaries' confidence.
• "If you give someone a fish," the saying goes, "they will be hungry again
tomorrow. But if you teach them how to fish, they will never be hungry
again." To give a woman a fish is to address her practical gender needs; to
give her fishing skills is to meet her strategic gender needs.
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 Reading
• Susanne F. Viefers , Michael F. Christie & Fariba Ferdos (2006) Gender equity in higher education: why
and how? A case study of gender issues in a science faculty, European Journal of Engineering
Education, 31:01, 15-22, DOI: 10.1080/03043790500429948

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