Image used with kind permission from the ‘Most Significant Change’ Technique: A Guide to its Use’, by Rick Davies and Jess Dart

Human rights, including women’s rights are dropping off the donor agenda. ‘Give it another two years’, said a United Nations official off the record recently, ‘and they will have completely disappeared’. 

Recent years have seen a marked shift in official development discourse, with less emphasis on a rights-based approach and more on an efficiency approach to gender equality, a tone set by the World Bank’s 2006 action plan – ‘Gender equality is smart economics’ which a number of official development agencies committed funds to resourcing.  Other equally disturbing trends are emerging, such as DFID’s adoption of the Nike Foundation’s ‘Girl Effect’ theme of ‘stopping poverty before it starts’ by ‘investing in girls’ – an approach that entirely ignores the historically derived structural inequities that are keeping many millions of girls [and boys!] in conditions of poverty.

Nike’s message is a simple one. It is communicated in a slick two-minute animation, on YouTube and at www.girleffect.org. Take a look.  It paints a picture of ‘the other’, living in a situation of dirt, disease and despair. A girl surrounded by flies,  taken out of the context of her family, community and country, objectified as the solution to the world being ‘in a mess’.  It paints a totally unreal picture of linear cause-effect change. Based on the mantra ‘invest in a girl’ it tells us there is a single, simple solution and we can stop worrying about the historically derived patterns of injustice and inequity in the world. Nor do ‘we’ have to either bother with finding out more about what is happening in the lives of people in poorer parts of the world nor how they perceive their own lives and how they want to make their own futures.

It is a message that is profoundly anti-rights. And it is one that says nothing about where boys - and men - might come into the picture.  It ignores notions of justice and equity in relations between people and countries that underpin a rights based approach.  The seeming triumph of the 1990s had been that social justice was seen as a sufficient reason for efforts to be made to secure gender equality. Women’s and girls’ well-being was an end in itself. Today, it is all about calculating the rates of return from investing in a person as if she were a piece of machinery.

Removing the realisation of rights, including women’s rights, from the donor agenda is part of a wider tendency to define development in terms of instruments – immunisations, bednets, numbers of children going to school, quotas for women in parliament – rather than xxx [you choose a good word, I was going to put “the social changes needed to make a fairer world”]. So we see investment in immunisations and bed nets rather than in x and y. This reflects the growing influence of large corporate sector philanthropic organisations and of the big accountancy companies. Technical solutions are sought for what are perceived to be technical problems.  ‘Value for money’ becomes equated with aggregated numbers rather than with value in supporting social transformation.  A very senior high level official from an OECD government was recently heard to remark to a group of international NGO representatives that he wanted maternal mortality to be approached as ‘a simple problem with a simple solution’.

Gender specialists in donor agencies are well aware of these challenges. One spoke of holding back on proposing to Ministers any revision of the agency’s ten year old gender equality strategy because of the fear that any revisions would be retrograde.  Another noticed the shift that had occurred with a change of Ministers. It was alright to fund women’s organisations for ‘budget monitoring or training birth attendants’ but there was  an aversion to the language of ‘rights’ because it sounded too ‘political’ and risked ‘rocking the boat with the partner government’.   This does not mean, she continued, that colleagues in country offices have abandoned a women’s rights and social transformation agenda. They use their knowledge of bureaucratic processes and discourse to fund projects under the radar.

Many donor governments are imposing extraordinary demands for reporting against quantifiable achievements as a measure of impact.  But in order to be able to count exactly how each penny or Euro of aid money gets spent, donor governments are risking not making any difference at all.  They can show how many kilometres of roads they have built or numbers of girls staying on at secondary school, as compared with before they started the projects. But development practitioners learnt many years ago that without local people empowering themselves to change the less tangible factors that cannot be counted but that have been keeping them in poverty, then when donor money stops the roads will crumble away and the next age cohort of girls won’t get to school. If this lesson is forgotten, instead of securing ‘value for money’, donor governments risk wasting money.

Donor demands are having an effect on all those organisations that are funded by donor governments, such as United Nations agencies, development research institutes like my own  and on non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like Oxfam International, all of whom pass donor government demands down to the organisations they are partnering in developing countries. The director of a women’s rights international NGO said ‘Anything that can be counted more easily is becoming more popular’.  Power, relations, the partiality of knowledge and complexity are ignored, as are surprises and positive and negative unplanned consequences. Staff of a European NGO that receives government aid money have been literally tearing out their hair as they are asked to produce standard across-the-board indicators that will distort and constrain the work of the great variety of networks they are partnering. I was recently copied into this email:

“Try to imagine: generic indicators for 23 alliances that represent an enormous diversity in all dimensions you can think of, except that they get their funds from the same source. And that after everybody worked for a year on their own objectives, intended results and indicators. It is impossible in itself and it discards all the work done over the past year. They simply changed the rules of the game just metres before the finish. And of course it boils down to even more reporting requirements.”

Some learn to play the game, going through the design and reporting hoops to get the money. Some struggle to continue to facilitate real change while pretending that they are doing what the donor expects. Other less adept at these games, get pushed aside and close down. Yet others are trying to be more selective about their partnerships, looking for those donors who have a more holistic understanding of how development happens.  However, the number of such donors appears to be rapidly declining.

The shift to the political right in many OECD countries has made governments reluctant to use aid money for advocacy and opt rather for the more technical and tangible quick wins, something also seen as vital to demonstrate at a time when public expenditure cuts puts aid flows at risk.  Even in those government agencies such as Sida that have not abandoned a women’s rights agenda, the domestic political environment’s demands for counting only what can be measured is having a serious distortive effect on the quality and sustainability of their rights-based programming.

Sustainable progress towards a fairer world requires people working together to change what is wrong with their society. International aid can help when donor organisations are prepared to support locally generated, sometimes messy and frequently unpredictable processes of positive change.

But today, many donors only want to fund projects for which the exact outcome of their support can be attributed to the donor and determined in advance. This ties the hands of aid recipient organisations. It takes away their ability to consult with their members in response to a local context always in flux.   It stops that process of empowerment that happens when individuals and organised groups are able to imagine their world differently and to realise that vision by tackling the injustices in their society.

Some very senior officials are now waking up to the hazards of the runaway ‘audit culture’ that is transforming development. The former head of the US Government’s aid agency recently wrote that those development projects that are most precisely and easily measured are the least transformational, and those projects that are most transformational are the least measurable.

At the moment Michelle Bachelet is trying to raise money from donor governments to make the new UN agency for women actually do real work to support the realisation of women’s rights. There is a very real and current danger that the donors will be placing such extraordinary demands on the agency that it will find it almost impossible to fulfil its mandate.

This is a call to action. Don’t just leave this to monitoring and evaluation experts to worry about. It requires a massive push back from women’s rights activists to make the space for social transformation that donor action risks shrinking.

Rosalind Eyben
Institute of Development Studies

We all know this is too simplistic. Improving women’s control of their reproductive lives requires challenging the barriers that prevent them from making choices about their bodies and sexuality, and the most entrenched of these barriers are structural – systemic violence against women and girls, gender discrimination in accessing services, inequalities in sexual relationships as well as in public life, the low status of women in society. Safeguarding women’s bodily integrity and autonomy is thus a profoundly political endeavour to do with changing unequal power relations and structures. It is also fundamentally about human rights - the right to be able to control what happens to your own body. 

As women’s rights advocates, we are thus faced with a complex terrain to navigate. Our cause is being championed but not in the way we intended; it has been sapped of political intent and reduced to a technocratic problem. DFID’s ‘unrelenting focus on results’ – as proudly proclaimed by the UK International Development Secretary, Andrew Mitchell – incentivises and intensifies this technocratic, de-political approach to women’s empowerment, and to development more broadly. As scrutiny of DFID’s spending intensifies in light of public disquiet about the safeguarding of the aid budget at a time of deep cuts elsewhere, ‘results-based aid’ and ‘value for money’ have ascended to ‘the very top of the UK’s development agenda’. Of course, we all want UK aid to have the greatest possible impact on the lives of the poorest women and men. But there is a real risk that resources channelled towards catalysing less tangible, more qualitative, and longer-term changes in people’s lives will evaporate under this pressure – for example, those relating to shifts in women’s control over their bodies, their sense of agency and self-worth, perceptions of personal security, or shifting attitudes about women’s roles in society.

Mitchell declares this not to be the case.  But why are the indicators in DFID’s new Business Plan so concerned with counting - ‘numbers of bed nets distributed’, ‘numbers of toilets built’, ‘length of roads built’ – rather than also seeking to capture the social and structural changes needed to end poverty and make the world a fairer place? Despite the rhetoric, there is only one indicator on women: ‘number of births delivered with the help of nurses, midwives or doctors’. This doesn’t seem a very ambitious reflection of the promise to put women at the heart of development.

The ‘unrelenting focus on results’ is likely to close off vital spaces for honest reflection on what hasn’t worked, as CSOs anxious about securing resources in a fragile funding environment will have too much to lose from highlighting failures. Particularly for women’s rights work, where changes to the status quo often lead to backlash, results-based aid is especially problematic, because reversals can be indicative of an approach that is working.

I hope DFID and other donors will seriously engage in the difficult process of developing indicators capable of meaningfully capturing shifts in the power relations that mediate women’s access to resources and rights, security and autonomy. I hope this will be done in consultation with the people who are best placed to articulate what ’success’ would look like – and that is not middle-aged white men in London. And I hope UK civil society will become more ambitious in the changes we advocate for - not merely asking repeatedly that women be ‘added’ but demanding fundamental changes in the discourse so that development becomes about seeking the transformational changes needed to create a fairer world.

Emily Esplen
(written in an independent capacity)

Here I want to meet the technocrats on their own ground by sticking to the narrow concepts and methodology of economics. I will argue the technocratic approach to be logically incoherent - and a confrontation with “rights” to be logically unavoidable.

Let me begin with a seemingly innocuous example: women’s labour force participation. One does not need a randomised controlled trial to establish “the strength and extent of the underlying evidence” that more work leads to more income,  i.e. increased female labour force participation furthers “development,” as measured by income per person.

Indeed, it is obvious to each of us that we could increase our own “development” (income) by working longer hours. We choose not to do this, however, since none (or at least few) of us are working the biological maximum of say, 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. If someone forced us to work longer hours, we must inevitably feel worse off, because we had already rejected that option when we had the right to choose. The technical economics point here is that income is no longer a reliable indicator of well-being once the right to choose is violated. Hence, “development” recommendations cannot make sense in a rights-free vacuum – respecting individual rights is a pre-requisite to any intelligible discussion of development policies as a way to increase human well-being.

I doubt the adherents to the technocratic view would disagree with anything in the preceding paragraph. Yet in practice, the technocratic discussions have a blind spot. I can’t remember the last time I saw a discussion of female labour force participation ask whether increased work is something that women themselves had the right to choose or decline. It is not exactly a secret that women around the globe often do NOT have this or other basic rights, and that there ARE a lot of men (or even other women) coercing women. Yet the technocratic approach heedlessly blends together in its “strength and extent of underlying evidence” cases of coercion, freedom of choice, and everything in between. And this blindness to individual rights occurs not just in female labour force participation, but in virtually every issue (including those affecting low-income men).

Why does this blind spot persist? I hypothesise that the technocratic vision is imbued with the unconscious paternalistic strain in development, in which “we” choose what is best for “them.” Although it is usually taboo to say “them,” development discussions frequently use the “we”. To be fair, I am guilty myself: despite criticising the “we” usage for a while now, I still slip into it.  It follows from the founding principle of development: that “we,” the “more developed” peoples, have some useful ideas, skills, technologies, etc. to convey to the “less developed.” Indeed, it would be foolish to deny the existence of any such potentially useful transfers. The difficult balancing act is to exploit such transfers while at the same time recognising the inequality in power between rich and poor, which raises big risks that “we” the rich will ignore or violate the rights of “them,” the poor. The technocratic experts, in contrast, are impatient to just get on with it, not to bother with some fuzzy and incomprehensible rights approach.

Not to make too much of one video, but the “Girl Effect” is unintentionally and usefully illustrative. The paternalism is already on display from the moment that it is about a “Girl,” and not about a “Woman.” Next follows the stereotype of the flies buzzing around the girl. As Alex de Waal and many other writers have pointed out, the aid business has long been saturated both with images of children and with degrading images of the poor, now often labelled “poverty porn.” The “we” appears in the first step in the technocratic transformation of the girl: “let’s put her in a school uniform.”

After further transformation, the “girl” convinces “the men” that “all girls are valuable.” The technocratic approach thus agrees about the desired endpoint of equal rights for women (and nobody should imply otherwise).

Yet the technocratic approach never really tests the proposition (which many would consider naïve) that technocracy will eventually yield equal rights, despite the technocratic veneration for “evidence.” Nor does the technocratic vision consider how much “we” may violate such rights (or unintentionally support such violations by others) of “them” along the way. Even if there were such evidence, it would not address whether the final state of equal rights made it “worth it” to violate rights along the way, and above all - who gets to decide?

Putting rights at the end inevitably enmeshes “us” in a tangle of paradoxes in which it will always be unclear who is benefiting from whom, or who is harming whom. Rights must come first, not last.

William Easterly
NYU Economics Department

Notes

¹ Glassman and Temin were responding to a critique of the “The Girl Effect” by Anna Carella.

Where does the problem lie? Rosalind identifies a tendency amongst some donors that certainly needs challenging. But not all donors, nor all of the corporate sector derived philanthropy initiatives, fail to promote a social change agenda. Indeed I have been struck by the great interest of US-based donors in supporting human rights, in their broadest terms − challenging inequities in distribution of resources, recognition of people as equals and the right to participation in social and policy decision-making. Given this, it seems paradoxical that the instruments that are used to measure change are unsuited to the task.

If just a tiny proportion of the money donors are willing to invest in finding quick fixes for HIV/AIDS, for example, were invested in testing interventions to shift the sexual cultures that are responsible for fuelling the AIDS epidemic in many countries, there would be more evidence available of what works well and what does not work well in diverse contexts. The desire for a quick fix is so dominant that even where there is evidence of the effectiveness of social interventions from evaluations using clinical models such as case controlled trials, few institutions or donors are keen to scale them up because this requires acknowledging complexity and that change takes time − interventions such as Stepping Stones, Inner Spaces Outer Faces, and Health Workers for Change come to mind. Institutions are more comfortable counting the number of people who have taken up anti-retroviral treatment, than counting and addressing those who subsequently drop out, let alone addressing causes of transmission including sexual violence, lack of sexual autonomy among women in particular and people’s use of sex in navigating poverty. 

Another factor that limits the possibilities of a transformative agenda among many donors is the use of their resources to support people and buy goods from their own countries – whether out of comfort or obligation. This creates a situation where expats fill Departments of Health, coming and going over a few months or years, with de-contextualised solutions marketed by US and European Schools of Public Health. A transformative agenda would see donors endowing local Schools of Public Health in southern countries, with strong governance, and funding to build PhD programs and training for health managers so as to consolidate national capacity over the long run. We are starting to see some moves in this direction, for example with the Africa-initiated CARTA programme, where nine universities in seven countries are building their own PhD programme, initially for their own staff. The solidarity provided by some European and US donors and universities, willing to support this locally shaped initiative, offers an alternative option others would do well to explore.

We know enough about what makes for policy change and for changing social norms and values. Donors  need the courage to acknowledge that it is only by supporting long-term capacity development and social interventions by and with those most affected, that ongoing dependence on donor funding can be ended.

Barbara Klugman

It did make me pause though, when I saw that the number of views for ‘the girl effect’ and its take offs were in the 100,000s whereas ‘The photoshop effect’ a video that ‘revealed’ surprise, surprise that photos of movie stars were 99.9% photoshopped had 7 million plus views. And we still don’t get even close to Lady Gaga’s billion views.

Clearly issues of girls and poverty are down there on the Youtube ratings, and for the 2.0 generation, precisely the audience, I would have thought, who need to be part of a conversation for social transformation.

Indeed, for me, engaging the 2.0 generation is the real issue, not so much putting (back) women’s rights, or human rights in general on the donor and the aid agencies’ agendas. We need to get this conversation and its demands moving among and by this generation. This is the generation who are creating new cyber worlds (and realities), and who, as ‘the boy effect’ Youtube (sort of take off) suggests, are being dominated by the messy narrow minded vision of the geeks, like Mark Zuckberg the creator of Facebook.

How do we bring the vision of UN Women into the 2.0 world without it being forced down the Nike corporate line?

To begin with we need to take seriously the complexity of the issues we are dealing with, including the world of cyberspace, who is dominating and who is creating it. So we communicate our world’s complexity according to where we are situated. That means engaging with very different realities of what rights and gender equality means according to which women, girls, men and boys are engaging with ‘development’ discourses. The digital age means we can bring to the fore new thinking, new images set by the 2.0 generation themselves. That is the challenge to listen and learn from what girls are saying, how they are saying and where theyare saying it.

UN Women just announced that it has elected 41 board members: 10 from Africa, 10 from Asia, 4 from Eastern Europe, 6 from Latin America and the Caribbean, 5 from Western Europe and 6 (Mexico, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Spain, United Kingdom and United States) from contributing countries. The question here will be how to work with the different realities of girls and women in these countries, to build on their different values and complex ‘messages’. Most of all the challenge is how to build on the vision of the multi-generational feminist movements in those countries. It is the historical action of feminists over at least 30 years which have made UN Women happen. How to keep up with the concerns of those feminists movements, those women and girls, boys and men cannot be captured in the measuring of ‘evidence based’ and log frame ‘result’ demands of today’s aid industry. We have to be bold enough to reject the current dull saga of fulfilling the MDG goals and (because they are not unrelated) denounce the pinkwash of Nike. We need creative, complex analysis that leads to transformation in multiple ways that borrow from the future.

Wendy Harcourt

New IDS Bulletin featuring some of the authors from Contestations Issue 1 on Islam and Feminism

Representations of men as perpetrator and patriarch have profoundly shaped the terms of gender and development’s engagement with masculinities discourse and practice. Many of those working in the field have remained hesitant, tentative, often hostile to the notion that men might be potential allies in the struggle for gender justice. Even feminists broadly sympathetic to the principle of working with men tend to set out from the notion that all men everywhere are inherently part of the problem. And so efforts have focused on involving men, engaging men, inviting men in – usually on our terms. This is a women’s issue, we say, but there may be a little space for you here.

Yet, in another corner of the international development world, it has come to feel as if there has never been so much attention paid to men. Men’s engagement is sought as the key to addressing men’s violent and abusive behaviour, and galvanizing changes in their personal and inter-personal relationships. As interest in men and masculinities has proliferated, so too has ambivalence amongst feminists about what this ‘men agenda’ is all about. For some, it’s a diversion from the real task of working with women to enable them to gain greater voice, agency and resources. For others, it’s a nuisance and a threat, draining away vital funding and attention from women’s rights. For others still, it’s a fashion without political substance.

Critics point at the extent that for all the initiatives aimed at challenging men’s physical and sexual abuse of women – important as they are – there’s a virtual silence and little visible action to address inequities in the private sphere, such as the domestic division of labour, or in politics, the economy or other areas of public life. Skeptical feminists rightly ask: Why are so few of the organizations working with men for gender justice talking about equal pay, about men doing an equal share of the housework, about addressing the masculinism in the political arena that makes it so difficult for women to get elected or to be taken seriously when they are? Why does so little work by men with men focus on confronting and changing the social, economic and political institutions that sustain inequitable gender orders?

Certainly the way in which work with men has been taken up by development institutions has often been lacking in ambition and devoid of political intent, preoccupied with creating more equitable men, rather than galvanizing men’s activism for a more equal world. This is not for want of sophisticated feminist research and theorizing. In some respects, it is an extension of the depoliticizing effects of absorption into the development industry that have been observed more broadly for gender and development. Much of the women’s empowerment industry is itself a throwback to the earlier Women in Development (WID) approach rather than taking its tone from the focus in Gender and Development on structural dimensions of power. As ‘men and masculinities’ has been rolled out by development agencies, it too has been depoliticized in the process, softening the very real concern about the ‘harder’ power issues at stake. In the process, we have lost the critical insights which characterized early debates around masculinities, and which held such promise for injecting new possibilities into a narrow gender agenda.

It was pro-feminist men working on masculinities in the late 1970s who opened up this radical seam of analysis and practice. They highlighted that in every society there are different ways of being a man. Australian theorists Carrigan, Connell and Lee (1985) offered us the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ as a way of making sense of the hold that certain ideas about being a man had over men – and women – and the power that came to be associated with those forms of masculine identity. Recognition that there wasn’t a single masculinity but multiple masculinities, many of which were subordinated by dominant ideals and practices, forced open spaces for greater recognition of the fluidity and diversity of men’s social identities. This set the scene for initiatives that sought out these alternative ways of being a man, and expanded possibilities for fashioning more inclusive alliances between pro-feminist men and women working for gender justice.

Thirty years on, it is proving harder than many of us had hoped for gender and development policy and practice to move beyond familiar stereotypes – women as abject victims or splendid heroines, men as all-powerful perpetrators. Development literature is infused with generalizations that valorize women and naturalize a particular, and limiting, understanding of gender relations. Axioms abound: ‘women are the poorest of the poor’, ‘women give more priority to others – men invest more resources in themselves’, ‘women live in a more sustainable way than men and cause less climate change’, ‘women are the antidote to the financial crisis’. This paragraph from the website of one international NGO captures a narrative that pervades the development industry:

Men’s power over women often costs women their lives. Women are more vulnerable to HIV infection because they are not able to insist on protected sex, even when they know their partner is infected. Men often use physical violence to reinforce their power over women and girls. Yet despite all this women, women are powerful forces for change, amazingly determined and resourceful in their fight to achieve a better future. Every time a family has good food to eat and clear water to drink, every day that a child arrives at school or a sick person makes it to the clinic, it’s usually a woman who has fought for this small, daily victory over adversity.

These representations cannot be too readily dismissed – they are themselves a product of the fragile struggle to articulate the complexities of gender-based oppression in a way that resonates in more technocratic policy-making circles. Nor can they be spurned as ‘untruths’. While they may have been sapped of their meaning through repeated telling and re-telling, they reflect concerns which are not unfounded. Yet they hinder as much as they help, being inserted into policy documents by policy-makers keen to tick the gender box, but who have little understanding or intention of ‘walking the talk’.  

But there is something else going here that’s troubling. Gender myths told and retold in policies and pronouncements on women’s empowerment gain a familiarity that makes them almost unquestionable. Representations of men are limited and limiting. The ready association of the words “men” and “masculinity” with brute force, brash competitiveness and brazen prerogative makes those on the receiving end of the exercise of masculine power decisively female. Female masculinities fall out of the frame; and the damaging effects of patriarchy on men’s lives and expectations are barely possible to countenance.

None of this is to deny the very real differences in power and privilege experienced by women and men on the basis of gender. Or the abuse perpetrated by some men and the prerogative assumed by many. Or the more diffuse but no less harmful effects of patriarchal structures and institutions. But we do need more complex accounts of this power. This includes recognizing the effects that the exercise of patriarchal power may have on men, as well as acknowledging how patriarchal social arrangements can disadvantage men as well as women. We need to take more seriously the ways in which other systems of oppression intersect with gender to create diverse and fluid experiences of power and powerlessness. This could lever open spaces for a more honest discussion about the indignities and subordination that some men share with the women in their lives as a result of economic and social oppression. Most of all, we need to find ways of articulating all this without losing sight of structural inequities and injustices, and without glossing over men’s accountability for the ways in which they choose to act out their privilege.

Challenging the stark separation of women and men into discrete and profoundly oppositional categories can help bring into sight the potential commonalities that, as human beings, we might well share   the points of mutual offense, outrage or indignity which can offer such a powerful basis for connection and solidarity. Take neo-liberal economic policies, which have such perverse and injurious effects on both women and men through the decimation of welfare states and deterioration of working conditions. Such profound injustices offer a powerful rallying point around which women and men can come together to wage common struggles. Mobilising men in pro-justice movements to take on gender inequities as part of their broader political work in turn presents crucial opportunities for advancing the social transformatory goals of feminism.

And there’s much that men could do. Take the glaring gap that exists the world over in the representation of women and men in political institutions. Men’s groups and movements could mobilize men as voters sympathetic to the issue of equity – and vote female candidates whose agendas address issues of justice and equality into office. They could organize men to hold decision-makers to account for voting against gender-progressive legislation. They could work with male politicians to address their attitudes towards women and gender issues. What about equal pay and discrimination in the workplace and in relation to economic opportunities? There is much work to be done with trades unions, which have traditionally been bastions of male prerogative. There is also a lot to be done on a personal level – men can hold other men to account in their workplaces, their universities and on the streets, including refusing promotion if the women around them are not being promoted, questioning sexist jokes and condemning belittling comments made to women. As our colleague Henry Armas argues, taking a stand and saying things like ‘Hey, that’s not funny’ or ‘Why do you say that?’ helps make the exercise of male prerogative socially unacceptable. These everyday battles, these small acts, can add up to big change.

Why, then, as the masculinities agenda continues to make stride forwards, do we see so few men actually taking up these actions – even the men around us who declare themselves sympathetic allies? There’s a sense that there simply isn’t enough reflexivity amongst men engaged with gender work on their own accountability, as well as on their own positionality and power. And that’s something that will continue to frustrate feminists who will eye them with suspicion rather than regard them as potential allies in the struggle against inequality and injustice.

Andrea Cornwall (University of Sussex) and Emily Esplen (One World Action)

References

Carrigan, T., Connell, R. W. and Lee, J. (1985) ‘Toward a New Sociology of Masculinity’, Theory and Society, 14 (5): 551-604

Let’s establish the facts first:

• The majority of violence against women is  perpetrated by men
• Women are disinherited by their male relatives
• Male decision makers refuse to prioritize women’s needs
• Mullahs and priests are male, and it is they who make such fundamental decisions as whether women live or die, have babies or not, can move freely or not, what they can wear, who they can talk to and not get stoned for it…

Dare we continue listing the facts? Women don’t make this up. We have seen male brutal power in action, and we have the scars to prove it. Who can blame us if we see MOST men as the enemy? Even the few who try to go against the grain, revert to type when the chips are down. When they think it’s safe, they pull us aside and say, “mmm but my sister don’t you think sometimes you go too far?” Or indeed they want to practice gender equality only on their terms. They want to hear us say things in the way that makes them comfortable. When we question and challenge, they accuse us of being ungrateful, of wanting too much, not understanding the challenges of management/leadership, or the great sacrifices they have to make to get this little quarter loaf of a change.

This “men business” has become a religion. Nay, a cult. In development circles, if you don’t show male involvement you are a pariah. Not doing enough. Ask anybody who has dared challenge a donor on this issue in the last five years. The invitations to speak at conferences dry up. So too, the funding streams. Evidence is beginning to emerge showing that this issue which appeared benign just a decade ago is THE thing. Fact: one big AIDS donor recently admitted in public – at the AIDS conference no less, that 60 per cent of their funding for gender equality goes to work with men and boys. Repeat that, 60 per cent! How are feminists supposed to respond to this alarming information? We should sit down and analyze what the money was for? Evaluate the programs and see if women were empowered? It’s simply abominable. Finish and klaar…(clear), as we say down here in Kwaggasfontein. 

It is true the programs on men and boys are totally lacking in political intent. But they have not been short on ambition. If we add the 60 per cent funding to the million men’s marches, is that not serious ambition? I don’t remember any donor giving us money for a thousand women’s march very easily, let alone any donor who allocates 60 per cent of their total grants to women’s movements – sorry the women’s funds don’t count.

Who wants complexity and has time for it in the 21st century? We live in a very stereotypical world with stereotyped views, and stereotyped behaviours. Consider how we are all wearing purple clothes this year. Everyone wants an I-pad. Manly men wear pink shirts, and womanly women have hair extensions. Reference the acres of column inches dedicated to analyzing this monochromatic world. Why do we assume the development world is immune to these stereotypes? We have become seriously one-dimensional societies, stripped of all complexity. When I talk about the politics of my country, Zimbabwe, nobody wants to hear the complex story. It’s simple isn’t it? Mugabe equals bad. Tsvangirai equals good. What is there to debate?

Ditto our news, media and ways of communicating. Nobody has time to hear complexity. Blessed is the person who still reads even a magazine (not a book, I said magazine), from cover to cover. We all want instant news, instant fun, and instant gratification. When I try to write complexity into documents, press releases, (you are so mad EJ Win!), nobody is interested. Eyes glaze over, the journalist/policy analyst/random student in my office starts to fiddle with their blackberry. It’s my cue that I am saying too much. They want the sound bite. They only want the one piece of data that tells women’s story. The donor and the policy maker want one solution, or as one philanthropist put it, “a widget”, that can change women’s lives. We recently found it. Eureka! See how the media and everyone went totally berserk over news about a microbicide that has 39 per cent efficacy. Nobody wanted to discuss violence against women, the human rights of lesbians, the struggles of sex workers. Too complicated.
 
While it is true that neo-liberalism etc have had brutal impacts on both women and men, it is a bridge too far to think we are united with our men in the struggles. We have been down this road before, reference the anti-colonial, anti racism struggles some of us experienced. Been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, owned the factory, and now sold it to defray expenses. We have more scars to prove it. I am sitting in a country and a region where women now know that our struggle as women is unique and ours to fight. Our erstwhile male comrades are even more brutal than our colonial masters, ostracizing us from family, political party and community when we don’t conform to their male projects. When we contest power with them they use sex and sexuality to cut us down. The scars are still too fresh and the battles are on going on that front.

All the things you suggest men should do; mobilizing other men, challenging one another, voting for women, working in trade unions, I agree they MUST do. Not as a favour to women. But because they want to, and they must do it if they are so called democrats, human rights activists/believers that they claim to be. The biggest thing men must do however is to change their personal behaviours, attitudes, and relationships with women. They must be consistent in demonstrating this change. We of course need EVIDENCE, (yes that ever so wonderful word that they love throwing at us), that what they are doing is contributing to gender equality and women’s enjoyment of rights. For now, please don’t expect feminists to be jumping for joy because men have done what they should have always done. Be good people. Simple enough?

Everjoice Win

Photo by Alan Greig

“Women are the subjects of feminism, its initiators, its makers, its force; the move and the join from being a woman to being a feminist is the grasp of that subjecthood. Men are the objects, part of the analysis, agents of the structure to be transformed, representatives in, carriers of the patriarchal mode; and my desire to be a subject there too in feminism - to be a feminist - is then only the last feint in the long history of their colonization.”

To what extent then is the recent flourishing of masculinities work with men, much of it avowedly concerned with promoting men’s contributions to securing gender equality, only another “feint” in men’s colonization of women? Or can men ‘want’ the goals of feminism, and if so, what are they prepared to do to help realise them?

The work of Ranjan Karmaker of Steps Towards Development in Bangladesh is testimony to the possibility of men wanting to support feminism and taking practical action in pursuit of that goal. Ranjan began working with men on ending violence against women and promoting women’s political participation over 17 years ago, long before “masculinities” entered the vocabulary of the development mainstream. For the first seven years or so, it was a struggle to gain acceptance from women’s rights organisations and feminist groups, whose vigorous campaigns against patriarchal power, in both private and public spaces, had left them unsurprisingly sceptical of men expressing a desire to give up that power.

But over time, and through continual efforts to ally with the women’s sector in tackling some of the most pressing problems of male power and their impact on women’s lives, STEPS earned first the trust and then the respect of organisations leading the feminist struggle. It is now an equal partner in that struggle, most recently coordinating the development of the Alternative CEDAW report for Bangladesh.

I have been working on ‘men and masculinities’ issues for ten or more years and like to think that I keep up to date with the developments in the field. But up until a few days ago, I had never heard of STEPS and the gender work it has done with men. My ignorance offers some lessons when it comes to reflecting on the question of what work with men can offer to the struggle for gender equality. The first is that this work, to be useful, is not so much about masculinities per se, but about men’s practices in relation to an oppressive gender order. It is concerned with what men think, feel and do when it comes to gender, with their experience of femininities as well as masculinities, and with the practical steps that men can take to promote greater gender justice, for the women in their lives as well as for them themselves.

The second is that this work is explicitly about social change. This requires personal change, but the vision is a broader one. The question for men is not about what kind of man do you want to be, but what society do you want to live in, and your children to live in. As such, it is necessarily concerned with the many forces shaping the lives of both women and men; the structural violence of transnational capitalism and the changing political economy of gender, fractured nation-states and conflicts over sovereignty, and resurgent patriarchalism in the guise of religious fundamentalism. If men want justice, be it economic, racial/ethnic, religious or caste, they must want gender justice.

Social change requires collective action and joint struggle, and this points to the third lesson. Not only is it important to understand gender relationally, but struggles for gender justice are about the relationships that individuals and organisations within such struggles nurture between them. Gender equality work with men cannot expect to participate in efforts to secure gender justice simply on the basis of men being “the other half of gender”. It has to earn its place and argue its case. It must welcome scepticism as an opportunity to engage in the conversation about what men have to lose and gain by challenging patriarchy. It needs to embrace accountability as a practice  of trust-building. And in speaking to the question of what do men want when it comes to gender, the field of gender equality work with men must be in greater self-reflection about what does it want politically.

Alan Greig

References

Heath, S. (1987) ‘Male Feminism’, in A. Jardine and P. Smith (eds),  Men in Feminism, New York and London