Gender at Work

Author: Michel Friedman and Shamim Meer
The monograph, “Change is like a slow dance” – integrates the reflections of three organizations which participated in a fourteen month Action-Learning Programme facilitated by Gender at Work in South Africa during 2004 and early 2005. The main objective of the programme was to catalyse and assist in facilitating a change process in three social change and human rights based organizations to deepen their own capacity for improving gender relationships and power inequalities both internally and in their programmatic work. The bulk of the monograph consists of chapters two, three and four, the three case study chapters that share the reflections of the participating organizations in the programme. The first and fifth chapters (ie. The introduction and conclusion) are written by two Gender at Work team members, the South African programme manager and facilitator with one of the organisations and the team’s documentalist. Chapter one, introduces the change process, its assumptions as well as the three organizations. Chapter five concludes the monograph by highlighting key lessons and insights that emerge from the process. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Srilatha Batliwala and Aruna Rao
Conversations with eighteen outstanding women leaders elucidate women’s visions, their perspectives on coalition building and leadership, and fundamental questions on how to challenge power and accountability. In their own words, these women talk about leadership and particularly women’s practice of that leadership for social change. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Kalyani Menon-Sen
This paper analyses the experience of developing a gender mainstreaming strategy for a multilateral development agency, the UNDP. Gender mainstreaming is central to the global mandate of this organisation. A core gender strategy has been developed centrally and passed down to country offices in the form of policy directives. The paper examines the extent to which this stated ideological commitment to gender equity has been successful in creating spaces for renegotiation of gender relations within the organisation, and the colonisation of these spaces by advocates for gender issues. Creating a conscious, committed and skilled group of internal gender pioneers, while simultaneously working to make the environment more hospitable to their ideas and activities are the central focus of the gender mainstreaming strategy. This group has to evolve strategies to take forward the stated commitment to gender mainstreaming, and counter the invisible resistance stemming from the gendered structures and traditions of the organisation. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Aruna Rao
Gender Equality Architecture and UN ReformsIn the last decade, efforts to make the development, human rights and peace/security ‘mainstreams’ work for women have resulted in impressive gains as well as staggering failures. Futhermore, gains for women’s rights are facing growing resistance in many places and too often positive examples are the exception rather than the norm. This paper briefly outlines the successes and failures of the current UN system in addressing gender equality and women’s rights, and puts forth several principles and characteristics that are critical to reforming the gender equality architecture in order to deliver consistent positive gender equality outcomes. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Aruna Rao and David Kelleher
This article describes and analyses the Gender Quality Action-Learning (GQAL) Programme of BRAC, a large rural development NGO in Bangladesh. This Programme works with male and female field-staff and managers in a process of issue-analysis, action planning, and implementation (of the GQAL cycle) to address organizational change and programme quality concerns in a way that is informed by an understanding of gender. The greatest challenge for the Programme now is to explore the gendered nature of power relations, and find ways to change gender bias along with other organizational, structural, and process features that promote gender inequity both within BRAC and in the delivery and impact of its social change objectives. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Aruna Rao and David Kelleher
This paper presents a conceptual framework on rights, institutions and social change which can be used to assess how gendered aspects of institutions, both ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, explain patterns of rights achievement, and more importantly, to identify institutional change strategies that challenge and transform power relationships to enable the realization of women’s rights. To deepen strategic thinking on transforming power relations, the authors argue for understanding the confluence of the opportunity structure provided by the state, the empowerment of women and their organizations, and formal and informal institutions which mediate both access and benefits. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Aruna Rao et al.
This is the technical report of an IDRC project that set out to understand hurdles to gender equality and uncover practical ways that they could be overcome. Using the Action Learning methodology with a group of Indian social change organizations, the study resulted in outcomes that have strong implications for future development policy and practice. Significantly, the framework for understanding institutional change proposed in this report has been received with enthusiasm in a number of workshops and is being adopted as a basis for program development and monitoring in two Canadian NGOs. It was recently used in a training program for United Nations Resident Coordinators and Country Representatives and will be part of a training program on gender equality for UN country teams. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Aruna Rao and David Kelleher
Development organisations can play a significant role in supporting women in the communities where they work to challenge unequal gender relations. The authors of this article argue that the majority of development organisations fail to do so because they pay insufficient attention to the importance of social institutions in perpetuating inequality. The article also examines how Gender at Work encourages development organisations to analyse gender relations in the societies in which they work, and in the organizationsinstitutions they need to challenge. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Aruna Rao and David Kelleher
In the world of feminist activism, we need to ask why change is not happening, what works, and what is next. This article points to the fact that while women have made many gains in the last decade, policies that successfully promote women\'s empowerment and gender equality are not institutionalised in the day-to-day routines of State, nor in international development agencies. The authors argue for changes which re-delineate who does what, what counts, who gets what, and who decides. They also outline key challenges and ways to envision change and strengthen the capacity of State and development organisations to deliver better on women\'s rights. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: IPS News Service
The Inter Press Service (IPS) recently interviewed Aruna Rao on the need for institutionalisation of women's empowerment. The women's movement over the last decade has revealed how legislative guarantees and policy reforms do not necessarily result in opening institutional spaces, and that participation does not necessarily translate into influence. Aruna argues that governance systems play a large part in women's ability to realise their rights and making their voice heard. For the full interview see: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=38586 [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Aruna Rao
Aruna Rao looks at how change is happening through the daily grind of gender equality activists. She argues that in order to achieve basic development objectives we need both better delivery and better accountability for a range services to women - not just education and health, but also agricultural extension, land registration and property protection, regulation of labour markets, and safety. She also argues that institutional insiders and outsiders need to support each others\' different but complementary roles as change agents. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Srilatha Batliwala
Of all the buzzwords that have entered the development lexicon in the past thirty years, "empowerment" is probably the most widely used and abused. In this article, Srilatha Batliwala argues for reclaiming, reframing, and resistance women’s empowerment, which requires a new clarity of vision and invigorated strategies on the part of feminists and their movements. A critical piece of this is to reformulate the concept and practice of movement-building. A compelling, powerful vision needs to be rearticulated with accessible messages to which poor women - and men - can connect at the local, national and global level. This is possible only by listening to poor women in their movements and struggles, to learn from them the values, principles, and actions that frame their search for justice. From such a process a new depth and breadth of organising and a genuine global feminist movement can be built. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Anita Gurumurthy
This paper locates development and gender in the rapidly changing global context, which in some fundamental ways is linked to new technologies. It seeks to use this understanding to propose a feminist reconception of development and of the gender equality project that is appropriate to the changing social landscape. The paper argues that the ‘information society’ framework is both a diagnostic and explanatory lens, through which to explore global socio-economic processes, as well as a theory of social change that helps to analyse the emerging meanings of development and gender from a equity and social justice perspective. It connects the ICT for Development (ICTD) discourse, to neo-liberal notions of development, unpacking how market fundamentalism in development has informed and in turn been shaped by the ICTD narrative. Using the concept of ‘inclusive citizenship’, the paper provides a new framework that restores the political content of development and gender in the information society. It highlights the urgency for addressing the governance deficit at the global level, and submits that positive social change in the information society can happen only with progressive public policy. The paper was presented at at a seminar conducted by the London School of Economics in May 2007. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Aruna Rao and Michelle Friedman
This chapter is from the book “Institutionalising Gender”, published by the Royal Tropical Institute, and was initially written as an overview paper to introduce the international seminar on Transformation for Gender Justice and Organizational Change held in South Africa in mid-1998. The main intention is to offer perspectives on what has shaped the connections between gender justice and organizational/institutional transformation debates, what visions are emerging and what are some of the current salient concerns. The issues outlined in this chapter have been abstracted from experiences and writings from practitioners in various contexts. While remaining cognizant of contextual differences is that this collage of issues will provide a useful introduction to this book on gender mainstreaming where the assumptions, paradigms and practices from different contexts will be explored. Through identifying important linkages, new questions can be articulated to further work in the field of organizational change. [DOWNLOAD]

Author:
Beginning with a physics analogy to illustrate how the act of observing something determines what we observe, this issue of Trialogue turns its attention to the possibilities opened up when organisational change is reconceptualised with a focus on gender and power. In Reflections and Research, Aruna Rao, David Kelleher and Joyce Fletcher discuss frameworks and definitions of power and explore how varied understandings of power have differential and gendered impacts on organisational relationships.The pieces by Pregs Govender, Rieky Stuart and Itziar Lozano in the Policy and Practice sections offer examples of how a focus on power brings to light strategies for challenging gender inequity within institutions. Finally, Susan Griffin offers the power of imagination and belief to create a hopeful vision for reaching a better future. These new and old ways of thinking about power are brought together in this publication to attempt an understanding of how power can be deployed by feminists to bring about organisational change and achieve equity and empowerment [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Aruna Rao and David Kelleher
In recent years, feminist scholarship and action has shifted its focus to the nature of institutional values and practices, and how they embody male agency, needs and interests, obstructing a gender equality agenda. This paper examines the role of organizations in unraveling institutional biases, how deep structure acts to hinder work on gender equality, and the need to weave new institutional rules for gender equality. The authors also present three complementary types of changes required - gender infrastructure, organizational change and programming for institutional change. [DOWNLOAD]

Author: Srilatha Batliwala
This speech was delivered by Srilatha Batliwala at the High Level Thematic Debate on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment held by United Nations General Assembly in March 2007. She lists the magic bullets popular in the area of women’s empowerment and gender equality: gender mainstreaming, micro-finance focused on lending rather than women’s empowerment, and quotas for women in formal political systems, and how empirical evidence indicates that none of these, singly or together, necessarily empower women. Of great urgency today are programs and strategies that address the invisible, informal, traditional systems - the arenas in which the majority of the world’s women negotiate their lives - which continue to oppress and exclude women and subvert their search for justice. Dr. Batliwala urges the Assembly to work for the implementation of a strengthened and unified gender entity within the UN system, which will have the resources to support gender justice activists and advocates on the ground in developing innovative new approaches and strategies that can create more sustainable transformations in gender relations at the levels where these are most critical. [DOWNLOAD]

Author:
This information-packed workbook contains a step-by-step guide for conducting four-day workshops in gender analysis. It also provides a "Gender Analysis Matrix" - a community-based technique for the identification and analysis of gender differences. Filled with useful learning tools on how to incorporate gender variables into development projects, the text is designed for gender training and self-teaching. The book includes practical case studies specifically chosen for gender training. These open-ended cases allow students to exercise problem-solving skills and develop practical solutions. Readers are also presented with alternative management strategies, and planning and evaluation techniques sensitive to gender issues. To order this book, [CLICK HERE!]

Author: Aruna Rao, Rieky Stuart and David Kelleher
This book presents an analysis of the institutional barriers to gender equality. It describes how to uncover the hidden values and cultures in order to stimulate and entrench new, gender-equitable ways of working. It lays out strategies and approaches for transforming organizations into cultures expressing gender equity and describes how these approaches have been applied in five separate interventions. The book concludes with an analysis of the approaches used in the five case studies and examines what can be used to create even greater gender equality in the future. [DOWNLOAD]

Author:
Restructuring, downsizing, rationalization, merger. These terms have become a part of every-day conversation within non-governmental organizations(NGOs). Indeed, the NGO community is facing new economic realities in an ever-changing environment. Grabbing the Tiger by the Tail proposes an approach to the organizational changes taking place that will equip NGOs with the skills they need to resolve their problems and inject new life into their organizations. The book describes in clear detail the work method which has been tested in Canadian NGOs and has yielded excellent results. To order this book, [CLICK HERE!]