Gender and development

A friend: I'm not sure why development programs can't be gender-neutral. How are programs that promote the development of democratic institutions, universal suffrage, and equitable access to education, medical care, and social insurance gender-specific?


Well...

It's not to say that some development programs can't be gender neutral. There are definitely programs that would work for the benefit of many people, regardless of gender and other factors. It depends what you are targeting, and what cultural and community norms and constraints may exist.

But to be specific... Equitable access to education is a perfect example, and could go either way. Let's take India. There is unequal access to education because of caste and class. People who are higher caste and (usually subsequently) class have better access to eduction for a variety of reasons. In trying to change this, there are various reservation (like affirmative action) systems in place in universities and lower forms of education. So here, the issue is lack of access to schools and fair education, sometimes lower castes being banned from schools, people being unable to afford schools with fees, not getting good grades because their family's economic situation demands that they work in the fields/help at home and puts constrains on their time studying and attending class, dalit ('untouchable' caste) children being forced to clean toilets or sweep cafeteria and classrooms in regular schools, or even being threatened or beaten up or killed for attending the same school as upper caste people (or accidentally touching an upper caste classmate)... you get the idea. So, in this case, perhaps an approach to access to education should be largely gender neutral.

However, another huge problem in lack of access to education is gender specific. Girls are not given equal access to education as boys in India. They are forced to stay at home and do house chores, take care of their siblings, cook clean sew etc with their mothers. While boys can help with chores too (say working in the fields or more male specific chores), it is considered much more important for a boy to be educated than a girl, so while it might be useful to keep him home too, his perceived need for education trumps that of the girl, or the usefulness of him staying home to help with chores. This is for several reasons that when looked at from a societal values point of view make sense, and are difficult to target for change.

When boys grow up, they most likely will marry. (Traditionally, and in the majority of cases today) boys live with their parents, bringing their wife to live in their house when they marry. They continue to live there and work and have a family, and all live together in one house. They work and support the whole big multi generational family. Education, therefore, will contribute to the boy having a better job, which will make him more money with which to support his wife, children, and also his parents. He can also marry better, and demand higher dowry since he education will help him make more money at his job and thus he is a good catch. A boys education therefore has a lot of importance.

When girls grow up, the most likely will marry. Most marriages are arranged, within the same caste and group (e.g. Andhra Pradesh / Telugu Brahmins are a lot different than Tamil Brahmins). Dowry is nearly always a factor, and often is a/the primary factor. Dowry is given to the family of the husband by the family of the bride, the amount depending on what they bargain or decide in the arrangement, and based on how pretty or *fit* the girl is, how old, how tall, how good the family is (honorability and mishaps of any and all extended family from both sides is taken into account during the matching process, and if the families want to merge..). Families pay large sums of money - farmers or shoemakers or fruit vendors might pay a lakh (hundred thousand) rupees dowry for their daughter - their life savings, and then some. Families need to save up forever, and often go into debt, for dowry and wedding costs (Indian weddings are over the top - my friends went to one and were given beautiful sarees as gifts, as were all the female guests, probably hundreds). Aside from bringing up problems about female infanticide or sex selective abortion as a result of this (and other - I can go into the "mandatory son" factor another time, if you like) practice, this practice contributes to parents wanting to keep their daughter out of school. They might not want to spend school fees or buy uniforms on a girl. They have proverbs that say "raising a daughter is like watering a neighbors plant" - you spend 16 or 18 or 24 years raising her and feeding her, and then she marries, you spend a ton on the dowry so she can marry well (for your daughter's sake, and for your family to be honorable / gain higher status - the idea of sending your daughter to the US as a bride is great bragging rights for a family), and she goes and lives with another family and cooks and cleans for them and takes care of them. School fees, as well as extra food, are often seen as simply an unnecessary investment, paling in comparison to the usefulness of having a girl stay home and help with household and family chores.

These "gendered" problems, lack of access to education for girls, are exacerbated within the "gender neutral" problems, meaning that lower caste lower class girls have higher instances of not being given access to education, for the various reasons that cause this in the first place. So in this case, the gendered approach is also important in the supposed non gendered issues. (I won't go into the various and horrific way that lower castes are oppressed - and the various issues that are women specific - dalit women have a similar history of sexual exploitation by upper caste men to that of black slave women and white plantation owners in the US.)

I asked at work just now and they told me that a more educated girl is preferred because this can help raise the status of the family she is marrying into. This also can mean that the dowry amount is decreased for an educated woman because she is more valuable/desirable (my friend's family keeps asking him if he wants a pretty girl or money). However, it takes money to send a girl to school, and it detracts from them helping with chores. Also the culture attitude often holds the mentality that educating a girl is not very important, especially higher education, because she will probably become a wife and mother and not hold a "real" job.

Class also comes into play here, as does rural vs urban, but a lot of the obstacles stay the same. Even in rich high caste families, is it custom that the wife moves in with the husband's family. Higher class families have less chores, or can afford maids and cooks and servants, so a richer girl is probably more likely to have access to more education. However the mentality says that once a girl marries she should drop out of school (if she is still studying, whether in 10th standard or college or university).

I must point out that this whole process creates a culture that often makes girls very undesirable - girls are killed, neglected, malnourished, and sex selective abortion is prevalent. This creates more gender specific problems, whether from a development perspective or otherwise (such as trafficking of girls to states with higher instances of sex selective abortions and female infanticide owing to a lack of enough women to be brides, and also contributing to a lower age of marriage, which means even less time for education since the vast majority of women drop out of education once they marry... you get the idea).

So in conclusion... development, or any kind of programs that target access to education in India, are looking at strong gendered factors, cultural norms that are deeply ingrained in and largely part of society. There are some aspects that you can tackle, like abolishing the caste system (ha), that would help make education access more equal, but it's important for development programs to be aware of the gendered ways that problems are faced differently by men and women, and thus development efforts need to be shaped accordingly. Girls in India are blocked from education because of gender factors, and these need to be targeted - thus the necessity of a gender and development perspective, not just plain development.

Or a shorter version could be: Access to education in India is gendered. Thus, so must be (some) development efforts.