For over 40 years, PRIA’s approach to gender mainstreaming has not been about adding on a ‘women’s component’ to an existing activity. It involves ensuring that gender perspectives and attention to the goal of equality are central to all activities – policy development, research, advocacy/dialogue, legislation, resource allocation, and planning, implementation and monitoring of programs and projects.
Such an approach requires influencing methods and processes of training about gender relations, identity and equality; strengthening feminist leadership in all types of societal institutions, public and private; and building coalitions that support scaling up of gender mainstreaming in development programming and governance. These directives have been central to our interventions around gender mainstreaming and equality.
However, with changing times, the pace of development, the advent of the digital era, we at PRIA recognise the need to evolve our approach towards gender mainstreaming in the following ways:
Revitalise gender training
Historically and currently, gender training (at two levels – programmatic and organisationally) remains the fulcrum of the strategy to achieve gender equality in development programs. Gender training is effective in enhancing the agency of the participants, but such agency need not necessarily be effective in directly influencing structural changes, especially in families and communities. There is a need to “unlearn” patriarchy.
There tends to be a gap between training outputs and outcomes. As short-term trainings do not seem to be yielding desired results, there is a need to invest time in reviewing and recreating gender training designs. Trainings need to be holistic in pedagogy and focused on self-growth of participants. Incorporating a learning approach that is mindful of gender realities and the social context of the participants makes training outcomes more practical and effective.
One of the many challenges that remains even today is that gender is still considered to be a “women’s issue”. As a result, the burden of achieving gender equality is left to one gender alone – women – who tend to be the primary participants invited to gender trainings. Majority of gender trainers also happen to be women. Gender trainings must move beyond the binary and include conversations on sexuality with the help of popular culture and feminist learnings.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sharp rise in violence against women and girls. We need to recognise that gender-based violence is not a new issue but the fact that it rose to such alarming proportions during the lockdowns laid bare that a lot more still needs to be done by gender trainers. They can incorporate counselling and mentoring support for survivors of gender-based violence as part of gender training in safe spaces so that survivors of violence can feel confident in sharing their experiences. Information on legal rights and awareness on sexual and reproductive health and wellness can also be included into gender trainings.
Adopting an intersectional lens in building capacities of a mixed group of trainers, especially among the younger generation. The mixed group would include panchayat representatives, civil society members, NGO workers, and women elected representatives at all levels.
Building a direct connection of gender trainers with larger socio-political movements
Gender trainers focus on building their own capacities through continuous reflection. Knowing one’s audience is the only way to develop methods and interactive tools for successful training.
The biggest challenge in this context is the lack of gender sensitivity in governance structures in both private and public organisations and institutions.
Organisations are sites of caste, class, race, ethnicities, and majority-minority power relations we exercise as individuals. The socialisation process of each person is different, and organisational development trainers need to recognise and analyse these real barriers to creating a gender-equal organisation. Organisational renewal is linked with individual transformation. A gender transformative organisational renewal process is a pathway wherein each individual has built the capacity to navigate relations, structures and decisions, with respect to the cultures of individuals working within and outside the organisation.
Therefore, OD facilitators need to be sensitised to gender transformative training, and recognise that organisations need to go beyond the formal or procedural compliance of gender mainstreaming to explore how to make that compliance much more meaningful and substantive.
It also requires a long-term and demonstrable commitment from the top, working with external OD facilitators who are empathetic but can critically examine the organisation. Linking OD training with gender training can transform institutions from being gender blind to gender transformative.
This will require creating a body of expertise and knowledge, and producing new training materials to embed and translate these ideas into an effective training program.
Deep-rooted socio-political norms limit representation of women in all governance systems. Political parties are controlled by extremely patriarchal men who fence women out of the political space, actively keeping them out of governance and politics.
A gendered analysis of the governance system across countries indicates that gender quotas coupled with overall democratisation and social transformation, supported by approaches such as mentoring, facilitating peer support and networking, have been effective in mainstreaming women’s representation in governance.
An overall strategy that includes gendered planning, budgeting and monitoring, and takes up the Women and Development (WAD) approach can influence policy and decision making by the state to promote women’s representation in governance. Just as we recognise gender equality as a societal goal, we similarly need to recognise women’s political leadership through gender quotas as a democratic goal, which allows women to get elected to political institutions through direct election.
Women need support to learn leadership. Collaboration among civil society to mobilise women, especially the younger generation of women, train them and make them capable enough to lead from the local up to the national levels is imperative.
These 3 themes were developed based on extensive dialogue held around gender during the PRIA@40 conversations between August and December 2021. Stakeholders – partners, associates, supporters, experts, investors, colleagues – drawn from civil society, government, business, media and academia – in collaboration with 50 national and international partners, participated.
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