All right, well, welcome to our last women and gender development discussion series of this year.
Those of you that have joined us before in previous years you might
have noticed that we didn't have one every month this year because we had a
big conference at gender development conference with about 200 people less than a month ago
so the next year we'll pick back up again with one it's not working yeah it is now oh
Okay anyway my name is Maria Elisa Christie, I'm
director of Women and Gender in International Development
here at Virginia Tech at the Center for International Research Education and Development.
I'm also a geographer- I'm saying that because I know a lot of you all are coming from geography
classes. Would you raise your hand if you are an undergraduate geography student and that means
if you're in a class even if you're not a major, just raise your hand if you're from a graduate wow
How many of you are geography graduate students a bunch of us too all right from yes of course
okay um well I'd like to start today by acknowledging that this event is held on
the traditional lands of the Tutelo and Monacan people who were the original custodians of the
land that Virginia Tech is built on. We had a sign up sheet I noticed that a lot of you signed in as
you came in that's great we'll also pass it around so if you didn't have a chance to sign up it is
important for us to keep track of that people come and somebody needs to give us money to buy people
so any future discussion series updates like next year's schedule will be on our website and uh
that's at the CIRED page and I'm not gonna redo that instead I'm gonna introduce Kelly.
So I actually met Kelly Summers when she took my undergraduate gender environment and international
development class it's almost two years ago now and was the best student in the class you
won't be surprised when you hear a presentation and that class will be taught next spring as well
um so Kelly after receiving her and now I'm on her committee for her master's I've been able
to accompany her research moves forward so Kelly after receiving a bachelor of science bachelor
of science degrees in Forestry and Natural Resources Conservation from Virginia Tech
she worked in Tanzania as a sustainable agricultural extension agent with Peace Corps
during her time in Tanzania she grew interested in amplifying the voice of
marginalized members of her rural community especially women and school children.
much of the work focused on creating opportunities for these groups to expand their capabilities
and she also advocated for their needs and for them to advocate for their needs
those interests followed her into graduate school where she studies
processes of empowerment and agro pastoralist Maasai communities so please welcome Kelly.
[Applause]
Hey everyone thank you Maria Elisa for that introduction. So my name is Kelly. As Maria
Elisa mentioned, I'm a masters student here in the department of geography.
Before I begin I just kind of want to share a cool a little something I heard last semester
last semester i was doing this big ultra marathon race and the morning of the race i really wasn't
feeling it and i was talking to this guy in the first mile or so telling him i was really nervous
and he told me this really nice sentiment. he told me to he said that you probably worked really hard
for this so you should just enjoy this day and really celebrate it and i thought that very much
applied to uh academic um academia and research so um i'm gonna try to celebrate this work and
i hope you guys enjoy it as much as i enjoy sharing yesterday um prior really submission
prior to being a graduate student i was a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania from 2015 to 2017.
As I was preparing to leave for Tanzania for two years um i was looking at the peace corps packing
list and the list said don't bring any expensive technologies like laptops or smartphones and i was
like okay that makes sense of course uh but little because i was shocked and very naive i arrived in
tanzania and literally everyone and their mother owned a mobile phone uh the first three months
i didn't have a phone i had a basic phone that i bought in country but i couldn't communicate
with my family back in the states at all um and then when i got to my community i eventually got
a phone and i just realized walking around and hanging out with people in my community that
people they they talk to more people on the phone in an hour that i talk to people in a week with my
phone so it's very widely used phones are widely used in my community in Tanzania and also when
i was in Tanzania I happened to read a National Geographic article about my advisor Tim Baird's
research on mobile phones in Maasai in Tanzania and that's how I eventually landed up back here
at Virginia Tech so thanks Tim for taking me in and for putting me under this national science
foundation umbrella grant to do this work so that being said go ahead and get started
okay cool um yeah so mobile phones they are a type of information and communication technology
they're ICTs so basically they connect people not only to each other but also to different types and
greater amounts of information compared to other ICTs like landlines and computers they require way
less investment infrastructure so they're low cost and way more accessible and that has contributed
them to being ubiquitous not just throughout the developed world but also the developing world
um some cool graphics that i found online these on this data is based on the united
nation human development report um in 1990 there were about 12 million mobile phone subscribers
primarily in the us the uk and japan so that translates to about 2.4 uh people
having a phone out of 1000. so really not that many people had a phone um from 1990 to 2002
there was a 100 fold increase in mobile phone um subscriptions primarily and developed areas as you
can see in this map and it was really between 2002 and 2005 that there was a global shift
in mobile phone ownership especially in low and middle income countries as you can see in this map
today the global system for mobile communication associations the gsma they estimate that there are
over 5 billion mobile phone subscribers around the world and over 70 of those uh reside in low and
middle income countries um so while this gap in full ownership between the high income and lower
income countries has narrowed significantly this widespread use of funds makes you wonder
whose lives are actually transformed current mobile phones as this is a woman and
yeah as this is a woman and gender and discussion series i'm sure no one is shocked that i am
interested in gender and mobile phone adoption so data from the gsma shows that there is a worldwide
digital gender divide in phone access especially in low and middle income countries as you can see
in this graphic that is changing uh women are ten percent less likely to own a phone
than men um and this is most pronounced in south asia and sub-saharan africa
uh sub-saharan africa i believe it's a fourteen percent gender gap between female phone ownership
as the fifth sustainable development goal the united nations for sustainable developmental is
focused on eliminating discrimination against women and promoting gender equality
obviously people are interested in one uh bridging this gap in phone ownership and
and two using icts and phones to empower women and provide opportunities
um so this is a nice quote i found from one of the executive directors of unwomen
icts offer vast potential for women and girls from ending poverty to improving education and health
to agriculture productivity and creating decent jobs so unsurprisingly there have been a lot of
studies that have looked at the benefits of a mobile phone diffusion in the developing world
these include they've identified a lot of the tangible intangible benefits for women including
improved access to health care
more market participation improved agriculture extension services and also i could mention
intangible intangible improvements like improve girl as a mother strengthened family ties
and improved psychological well-being and increased autonomy in some places as well
however while some people view mobile phones as this great equalizer other people believe
that phones uh it funds amplified disparities for people who are maybe not well positioned
in society like women um a lot of these studies have found that phones they don't they haven't
transformed our lives like some people claim but they actually become embedded in the existing
social patterns the existing social norms um in our society they found that um a lot of barriers
that women encounter to mobile phone access are highly influenced by existing
social norms that inhibit their access so these contested findings they basically just highlight
the need to investigate investigate deeper most of the scholarship on icts and development
and women have focus have relied on large-scale quantitative surveys and country-wide statistics
or have focused on urban areas and kind of have not focused on rural areas so taking all these
um taking all these uh and all these gaps in the literature um i really want to examine the social
implications of phone adoption and bone diffusion and highly contextualized local peoples like the
maasai in east africa this photo is a picture of a massage woman with a foam around her neck
you'll see there's like a little bag a lot of people like to use these bags in tanzania at
least to hold their phones which is great because it helps it not falling into a basement of water
um yeah so to determine if and how phones empower maasai women this work is really
guided by two big research questions the first one is how do masai women access and use phones
so since this is sort of a pioneer study that has looked at mobile phones and um mobile phone
use of women and messiah communities we really just take it way back and just want to identify
barriers that people and women encounter to using their phone and strategy which strategies they
adopt to overcome these barriers and also try to understand like what reasons do you
use a phone and what are some challenges that have come out that have come up using phones
and as i mentioned earlier uh social existing social norms are found to be very important and
the implications of phone axis and gender gaps so my second research question is really
focused on how our msi women's bonuses embedded in existing social relations
so social relations is a big thing but i'm really interested in um social relationships within
a household so how do people interact with each other in the household and how does that relate to
phone use to resource distribution and participation and decision making
so to answer these questions i really pulled from the literature on women's empowerment
and sustainable livelihoods i'm sure many folks in this room who are in women and gender are familiar
with nyla kabir which is one of the big names in women's empowerment literature she conceptualizes
empowerment through three interrelated dimensions uh tangible intangible resources so that the
preconditions someone needs to to practice agency which is the ability to practice choice
and then the third dimension is outcomes so this definition um empowerment is a process
where strategic choices are made from options with resources and through agency to achieve a desired
outcome by those who were previously denied this so that last little bit is important people who
previously were disempowered they gained more power it's the process of getting more power
and uh it's also important to note that gaining more power doesn't mean that other people lose
power um so just because a woman gets more power doesn't mean a man will lose power in the process
so when i was really trying to picture this is how this uh whole thing works in my mind i made this
little conceptual model that's adapted from sustainable advocates and could be your social
relations approach which basically says that we have these different institutions a family
community market state and norms at these different institutional levels
they create and reinforce social relations and gender is just one type of social relation
that creates and reproduces differences in the structural positioning of men and women
so basically men are positioned differently in society than women are positioned
and this social position influences what resources are available to these groups like what
tangible resources or intangible resources and as well as the extent that they can have this agency
outcomes of using resources to practice agency can either contribute to or undermine norms that
institutionalize gender inequality so in trying to figure out where phones fit in this research
like a scholarship and i believe that social position influences phone access for a group
or an individual but also that phones they they increase access to like i mentioned
earlier they increase access to different types of information and greater amounts of resources
and the the introduction of funds into like a social system uh provides an opportunity to
really renegotiate these norms that institutionalize gender inequality
um while there's so many different institutions we could look at i'm i particularly am interested
in uh interhousehold the family institution so i really want to understand social structures
and processes in messiah households traditional development scholarship it defines the household
as a single unit where individuals behave in harmony another widely used definition is a
group of people living under the same roof eating out of the same pot and making joint decisions
so this this definitions are nice but they don't apply to all contexts they definitely
also don't capture their complex and dynamic negotiation of power that happens in a household
um this picture right here is a messiah what i would call a messiah household so the messiah
a little bit of background on them they are a pastoral group in east africa that
means they primarily rely on livestock for their livelihoods and also some agriculture
but they live and also pollutiony is widely practiced so pollution is when there is one
husband and multiple lives and these norms of pollution and also mobility from moving from
one side to another because of livestock makes it difficult to really conceptualize the household
so in this picture here you see uh it's like fenced in the whole fencing area is the household
but then there's multiple sub households uh within the sub household within the household and
uh each wife is i guess you can say a female sub household head so each each wife is in charge of
one of these sub households and maintaining it and then the husband sometimes has his own sub
household or he bebops around all these different stuff made this little graphic right here uh
within the sub-hustle this very extended family could live in it you could have the male household
head and all of his wife's children but there could also be the male household head's mother or
another primary another male figure in the house so it's very complex and dynamic and people they
all contribute to decision making differently and they show resources differently and they're
also involved in different institutions in the community and like the market or ngo
intervention um so just really they're introduced to different things and so that's how i tried to
uh conceptualize the maasai household um cool so to do this research we traveled to tanzania
me and research team last summer summer of 2008 for about a month or so and we primarily did
qualitative group and stakeholder interviews with about 72 women in massage communities
so while this was this research here relies on the women interviews for the most part but at the same
time my advisor the rest of the research team they were doing interviews with men that's not
included in this but i'm sure in the future it'll have some very exciting uh findings to share um
yeah so we chose in these communities we only did work in five of them you see there's ten up there
but in five of these communities we chose to go there because the research team has an established
relationship there um i know my advisor has been doing work day since about 2005 and another person
in the research team has been doing work in the area since 1990s something for for a hot minute um
so there's a there's an established relationship between the research team and the community
but not just that it's also that over the past 10 years these communities have steadily gained
improved access to mobile phone networks and mobile access mobile phone technology
they're also all predominantly ethnically messiah and they share a lot of cultural norms
regarding gender and age so like i mentioned earlier a lot of very patriarchal practices
where men exhibit a lot of power also age is very important but that's more it's more important for
for men because men get older they go into different age sets
what they do around what their role is in the community it's not as pronouncing women though
uh so our interviews with women they basically focus on their perception of
using phone access we talked about hey what type of people do you talk to on the phone
do you talk to face to face like what do you see as the benefit of using a mobile phone
um like what berries do you encounter we also talked about decision making within
the household and participation in different community groups and just the relations among
different members of the household in some of the interviews i tried to do some participatory
methods where we made a seasonal calendar and also some social network maps to try to visualize
what a social network looks like for a woman in thailand which i will show you guys that later
the information collected in these interviews was used to develop a household survey instrument
um well one for the male household head and one for a female sub household head
which i pull from a little bit um in this talk but not so much
this is a picture of one of the interviews we did we're doing our participatory methods
uh that's me and my one of the translators sitting with a group of msi women um so
after coming back and transcribing all these interviews and really looking
at them uh we found four big themes that i want to share with everyone here today
the first one is that phone access is more than just hands handset ownership so obviously
just like here um we need electricity we need like a phone plan a sim card
we need money to pay for these things if you don't have those then phones are just like a really
expensive uh paperweight basically so phone access is more than just handset ownership and oftentimes
these extra materials that were needed for to use the phone were the most constrained for women
especially material resources so like i mentioned electricity voucher to pay for credit
money sim cards were the most constraining uh one woman mentioned in an interview for first
is the challenge of having the money if you don't have then you stop communicating uh that's pretty
pretty deep statement if you think like you stop communicating completely if you don't have money
to pay for um phone artifacts uh electricity so most of the communities in our study area
are not on the national electric grid most of them rely on solar panels actually at the
village at a village center at a shop or within their own household
this picture right here is a solar panel on one of the sub households in a household
one thing that i found very interesting that the woman talked about in our interviews is that
if women are people that rely on the markets in the village center to charge
their phones there's a lot of demand there's a lot of congestion actually
to use these solar panels where women said they often have to wait a day or two before that the
shop can actually charge their phone because there's so much demand um yeah um
i think that's about it for this slide um so other resources that are needed are human resources
you need to be able to read and you need to have some digital literacy to actually know how to
navigate and use a phone a lot of the women that we talked to have never attended school before
they they lack literacy um so they couldn't read text messages a lot of the time uh and
they also lack digital literacy especially when it came to using more advanced phone functions
especially internet so as you can see on this photo here um you can see there's like a little
facebook app and there's a twitter app uh so the woman i was talking to the woman who owned this
phone and i was like oh hey jeez like internet at all and she was like no i don't like she had no
idea what internet was she didn't know what those applications are i thought that's very interesting
they have the phone that's capable of accessing those but they don't think it's irrelevant
even though there's a really uh fun song in east africa called facebook
that everyone should listen to it's about uh the spread of religion or
um how facebook is distracting from religious practice uh i highly recommend that song but yeah
human resources are also needed to use a phone uh perhaps unsurprisingly relational resources are
really important basically the women in the study they rely on their social network on their husband
and brother and children to access both the material and human resources needed to use a phone
um i think about six in the survey 69 percent of the woman owned the phone and a lot of them over
half of them received a phone from someone else from their husband or from their child
and the same goes with the phone match of the credit that they need to use the phone most
most most women rely on like a weekly voucher allowance from their husband so they rely on
someone else to get these resources for the women who are illiterate who couldn't read they would
rely a lot would rely on their children to to read text messages that came in or to to write text
messages to someone else so just this reliance on their social networks is very pronounced
uh also i was very interested to find that for all women for whether they owned a phone
or not they all now a lot of them uh borrow a phone occasionally from someone else so like i
mentioned before a woman could be without charge on her phone for a day or two throughout the week
they they find ways to to use the phone by using someone else's phone
yeah so that's perhaps the oh i wanted to mention that this uh reliance on other other people for
the human resources organizational resources um there's a lot of benefits to it but it could also
also introduce a lot of uncertainty in whether or not someone can access a phone
if perhaps you rely on your husband to give you phone voucher for the week and
he doesn't give it to you you either have to do without or you have to find another way to
get bone voucher so the second big thing that we saw was that in the title of my presentation
uh men are the gatekeepers to phone axes for a lot of messiah women in these communities
um this is most so basically women shared that patriarchal practices
where husbands have way more power are most acute at the household level where the husband exhibits
considerable authority over determining the rights and roles and responsibilities of other household
members especially his wives so basically the husband shapes and limits his wife's experiences
and this has a lot of great implications like a lot of significant implications for it can mean
if a husband really wants his wife to have a phone and use it like he can provide the resources for
her to use it but it could also mean that if he doesn't want her to access the phone he might be
able to to prohibit access in several ways so uh men being gay gatekeepers is really pronounced in
several in two different ways the first one was that men they mediate resource access so like i
mentioned before a lot of men purchase phones for their their wives or they provide them voucher
a lot of women are they have to wait on their husband to provide them the phone they can ask
them but it's really up to the husband to decide oh i'm gonna buy you a phone now and some said
someone will make sure that they have to wait a very very long time to actually
uh get a phone um and then for many women believe over a quarter of them they had a husband who
checked their phone regularly but take their phone from them and read through their messages to see
who are they talking to you and what were they talking about and to see if they were talking to
a number that they don't know which a lot of husbands don't like um even more significant
than checking a phone over half of the women had a husband who took a phone away from them at some
point um i can't imagine what that feels like to have a phone and have it being taken away from
you almost becomes disempowering um so one woman said if the husband takes the phone away the woman
is without a phone and without a communication which is a pretty big banner used to using it
so also with resource access um in in the household most the men have they own most of the
resources in the house this is a pretty startling quote that one woman said uh women do not own
anything can't do anything without telling the husband first if they don't they will be punished
men are free without asking for for permission for this quote i wanted to share as well so
basically there's not much a lot of the women studier they didn't see that there was much
cooperation between men and women and they were um some were very exclusively upset about this they
didn't feel they didn't like how they had to ask for permission to do something or to go somewhere
um one woman said this she said we like how other tribes and cultures
cultures cooperate and make decisions together but we don't have that
we need cooperation with men and instead of men saying you don't have a cow a man can give
you a cooperation that's a pretty powerful statement especially in a pastoral community
yeah so that
resources is one way that men are gatekeepers but also men influence household norms and the
social positioning of people within the household one thing that we found surprising talking to
women was that there's favoritism and religious relationships perhaps that's unsurprising but
hasn't really been reported much in the literature that men they oftentimes have
a favorite wife within the household and sometimes they have the least favorite wife
and this influences how not only women interact with the husband but also how they interact
um among themselves this is a oh well i've written dude in dengue and deeda is what clone called the
favorite wife and dinghy is the least favorite with and it's talking to women people would say
that candida is really manipulative actually of um well if one of the other wives goes up to the
husband and asks oh hey can you sell this cow so that i can get some money to start a business as
soon as that wife walks away the favorite wifey and gita will walk up and be like you should do
that but for me so she's very manipulative and the husband uh according to the woman the husband is
more likely to listen to the voice of the adidas but interestingly talking to the woman as well
it sounds like the india while she might have access to more resources she might get more food
from her husband she has less autonomy because her husband is maybe more controlling of what
she does and where she goes in the community whereas some other webs especially his least
favorite wife might have more freedom to to wander around and participate in groups and not have
to ask for permission for things so i mentioned earlier i did some participatory methods and some
of my interviews this is the social network map that intended which is like a community network
so basically to give you a quick explanation of these there's five concentric circles you'll
see uh those circles represent uh distance that they're not drawn to scale of course but distance
from the from a woman's household so woman is drawn in the middle that first circle is like
her household the next one is the sub village i think next one is village and then it goes
out further and further and then the field and dots you'll see those are people that she knows
the bigger the filled in circle is uh the more important that person is to her according to that
that woman um so as you can see there's two maps up here that i put the one on the
right hand side is of the least favorite wife of a least favorite wife that i talked to bitten
dinky you can see that she has a lot of a lot of people that she talks to in her social network
um the the biggest the biggest thought that you see that's one of your sons that lives
in the same sub village uh another the second biggest thought that you see is all the way
i believe you lived in the city of dara salon which is way outside of the region um the small
dot you see within the household is your husband she's a much like her husband as you can imagine
but you can also see she's really active in a lot of different groups she's uh active in a school
and um some income savings uh or some income generating business she's uh active in a church
she has this a lot of actually what i was talking to i think in the 90 minutes i was talking to you
she must have received like 10 phone calls regarding business and regarding just people
saying hey so she was pretty popular outside of the village maybe not so much in her household
um the other the other social network map you see is of another wife within the same household
i believe this household had eight wives in it um you can see this life right here i don't know if
she was the favorite wife or not a lot of women don't claim that title because as i mentioned
people here as manipulative and they don't really want to claim that but this other life you can see
she just has fireless people that she talks to and connects with um sorry that could also be because
of age or some other thing because she was a little bit younger but i think it'd be really cool
to look into this more in the future definitely all right so that's the second one then our
gatekeepers to phone access going on to the next one as you can imagine if someone wants to see
the phone they're going to figure out a way to use that phone so women develop strategies to overcome
this fluidity and resource of resource variability and also controlling husbands whoops so some of
the ways that we found that women figure out ways to get a phone to get the resources is to
participate in income generating activities or to become part of a savings and loan groups
um this is a nice quote that one woman said she was very active in business uh they're struggling
as a woman but if women do business they feel stronger because they have capital women used to
depend on their husbands but now they feel strong because they have the opportunities to get their
own money so it was cool to hear that okay we feel more empowered because we can participate in these
activities that previously they weren't doing um also overcoming various other controlling husband
women had some varied strategies for that and it sounded like it depended on um the social
position of a woman in a household so a lot of women were like yeah we hired the phone from our
husband if he doesn't want us to have it some will actually give a hus uh their phone away to
like a friend when the husband's around or even to a son or a child that they see often that so they
can still access the phone but have the phone uh hidden away um some wives completely disregard the
husband's wishes especially the least favorite wife or some other women they completely ignore
him and are like you know i don't care what you say uh one what one woman said that especially
if your husband is uneducated um if she she receives a call and she sits from a number that
her husband might not approve of she's like oh the network is bad and she doesn't answer the phone
and i guess that fools her husband so they they develop strategies to overcome
controlling husbands if they really want to um so moving on to the fourth big theme is that
so those first things are really just like how do women arrest the phone and this next this fourth
thing is really what did they use it for and why did they use it and of course just like there's
a lot of variability in phone access there's a lot of variability and reasons for using a phone
uh so talking to women women are super excited to use the phone because they could talk to people
that they don't get to talk to before so a lot of women when they marry they leave their community
and they go live in another village sometimes in a different region and if they leave without
a phone they don't get to talk to their their needle kin their birth family at all but women
are excited that hey with the phone i could talk to my mother and brother and my brother a lot more
often and they were excited about that um so they were they liked using the phone to maintain their
existing relationships not just that they're birth family but also with friends in the community
yeah so that was a very important thing for them while some women use a phone to
to start new businesses or to to participate in community rooms really very few of them
actually use it to seize new opportunities um that's something that i've been talking about
in the future like oh hey will people use phones to participate in like the market and
talk to people they don't know but talking to the woman in the communities i was in they they
would laugh if i talked if i asked them do they talk to non-massage people they just thought it
was hilarious the thought of talking to someone who wasn't from the same ethnic group as them
some issues that women shared some concerns from using a phone was uh
addiction just like here we're all addicted to our phone uh women saw the same thing
in their communities especially like if their phone's taken away they're like yeah this is
a bummer if there's no electricity or phone signal we can't use your phone
just like we were still here um but they also thought addiction was particularly damaging for
young girls who were at school especially like a board a boarding school they said that girls
would use phones to communicate with a lover or something and would eventually drop out of school
um to marry or develop a relationship with this man so a lot of some women were concerned about
that and then another issue that a lot of women talked about was the breaking of relationships um
like like i mentioned then men can look at phones they check phones they look to see who
they talk to and it causes some conflict within a relationship damages some relationship it can
break a marital relationship and divorce is not very widespread but it definitely
can cause some animosity tons of animosity among people so those were the um for being big themes
so what i really want to share with everyone like the thing is the big takeaways from this
presentation about mobile phones and gender the first one is that phone access is fluid for
not just for women but also for men you just never know if you're gonna have the resources that day
to actually use a phone um for women it might be more pronounced because there's also the aspect
of a husband or other men being there and the reliance on other people in their social network
basically there's institutional arrangements that place women in subordinate positions
creates an environment where phone access is unreliable um and this also may be relevant in
other resource types but it was very pronounced for this new tech new ict technology that was
uh in the communities uh the second big thing is that there is no one single pathway between phone
access and empowerment um there's a multitude of relationships provided on a phone isn't an
automatic solution to empower someone and just like an empowered woman may not have greater phone
access than someone who is disempowered um there's a lot of different ways it could go as i mentioned
before while the phone is a tool to to gain access to new information and resources um it also can be
used as a tool to to exacerbate or reinforce existing gender inequalities which is what we
saw with what some of the men did with uh their phones they'd use it as a tool to punish their
wives if they didn't do something or potentially to a war them if they're happy with um an activity
um i saw this really nice quote and another paper that's been done on royal populations in kenya it
said phones may benefit some women but they have yet to transform lives across multiple scales
so phones might have been hired one woman but it hasn't caused
widespread transformation in gender relations um
i also want to mention that uh talk about favoritism favoritism is kind
of a structure that's created by men that really um that gives
favoritism as a structure that's been created by man that gives
the ability for an empowered woman to disempower other women so that has some negative
implications and a sweeping generalization that all women are impacted the same by adopting phones
doesn't encounter differences um amongst women so as i mentioned earlier from uh women used
bones primarily to maintain relations and not diversify them um i believe that men use phones
a lot to talk to more more and different types of people which might introduce different ideas that
might introduce different ideas and uh women don't have quite as much
uh contact with people who are different from them so that could have implications on
introduction of newer days that could challenge um existing gender inequalities that are there so
one of the last things i want to mention is that uh social position and intersectionality matter
so intersectionality is really just we all have multiple identities like in this room we're all
it's not just being male or female but it's also like your religion it's
um your educational love your your um what income status you are also like what sibling number you
are like in your household that matters and it's the same for the messiah woman
um it's not just i talk about favoritism it's not just about what is the favorite
life relief at least favorite wife but it's also like this for um it's also the status
of your son in the community like if your son is really well respected you might get more respect
and uh be in better relationships or it's if you're also education level so just basically
in ict for development interventions you really need to consider the not everyone has um multiple
overlapping identities and it's not as simple as and that's not as black and white as what
neon female yeah basically men are extremely inexplicably linked to women's empowerment men
are not um independent of women and women are not independent of men and this is important
because um in interventions that regard women's empowerment not just with icts but in general
you really need to engage both men and women to ensure that it can it'll actually work regarding
mobile phones they're really just tools providing them is not gonna it's not a simple solution it's
really how you come in when they leverage these tools is what matters um yeah so just some quick
acknowledgements like i mentioned i'm part of my advisor tim took me under this national
science foundation grant and um we're going to work with him over the summer also on the uh
on the graph is terry mccabe out of university of color university of colorado boulder and emily
woodhouse on university college of london i sat with her on a lot of my interviews
and that was really great learning experience to see her interact during his interviews of
course i wanted to thank the tanzania field team especially felissa and naomi they were translators
but also the rest of the team for organizing and traveling around want to thank the seared team for
having me here today maria lisa for extending the invitation to come the department of geography for
and that's about it a nice picture of the research team on their phones
and just so you know we actually have the room half an hour longer after this if
anybody wants to come up um after people leave at 1 30 you're welcome to so field questions
yeah what's up so it seems like there's getting to be more um single messiah women either widows
or women that you know leave their men did you encounter that were there did you see differences
um we didn't talk to any i did talk to one widowed woman actually in an interview and she relied on
her best friend to get a lot of resources she was living in poverty and she relied on her neighbor
to to get a phone and to do a lot of um just just to get by really and not just for phones but also
just to get food and everything um her children lived far away from her she didn't have much
interaction with them she did have a phone and she said she got a phone call from her daughter
once or twice a month and that was a very exciting time for her that was the only woman that i
talked to that i was living independently women did talk about how they some women
do go and live on their own and have set up their own homesteads and become male
female household heads i didn't encounter any of those um it would be really interesting to go and
talk to them and see what are the differences when it's a female household head when
the men aren't necessarily gatekeepers to their phonators when they're
not dependent on themselves yeah i like your [ __ ] by the way
how do you see because younger women are
now getting phone access do you think that will change the results of your study at all
or like in the future i think that would have any impact on how men are using phones to control them
um because younger women are getting access to phones um one thing that we found
pretty pretty interesting is that age is a very important phone axis a lot of the older people
that we talk to they don't have they're illiterate like i mentioned and they actually depend on
these younger generation to do a lot of things that they're unaware to do
the gender aspect of that i'm not sure what that is there's just so many different factors
going on as well like a lot of women are going to school now before they couldn't go to school and
they're participating in different activities in different groups so it's hard to say like phones
for sure we'll we'll change it but i'm excited to see where it goes in the future thank you
uh what language was the like the phone screens in like was it typically one language over
another one or was it a mismatch of all of them just because they got it from different places
uh it was primarily english and spoke like the applications were in english that people
knew what they were um but sweetly which is the national language of tanzania that's what
you'd see that a lot um i actually didn't see any text messages in ma which is the local language
i'm sure they write mal though i don't know it's a good question
but yes primarily english in a lot of the technology thank you
did you find that um the women's access to phone or or having a phone reflected on
the status of the man who gave them the phone um sort of like i mentioned like
the intersectionality they have multiple identities and that their identities often
relates to the identity of their the men in their lives especially the son and their husband and
trying to trying to figure out oh what makes a husband more controlling we got really mixed
uh responses to that like someone were like someone said um the older husbands don't really
care for women if their wives have the phone but the younger more educated men really care
if they have a phone and they're more likely to check them but some women also said that having
more education maybe they're introducing more liberal ideas and they're like oh this is great
like women's empowerment and they're more likely to support their wife having a phone so lots of
lots of variability and what happened in that yeah that's a good question though thank you
yeah you mentioned in some of your interviews that women commented on like neighboring societies and
how they sometimes had better systems in terms of like how plus distributed how men relate to women
uh what are some examples of that and do you think that any of those uh structures are implementable
in maasai culture that's a great question yeah so the messiah are probably among the most
patriarchal communities not just in east africa like in the world and in the community i lived
in when i was in tanzania i lived with the one or two one youtuber tribe and yeah there's some
gender inequalities but there's a lot more cooperation among families that i saw like
talking to people like my i mean i wasn't doing a study when i was a peace corps volunteer but
talking to women they weren't dependent on their husbands to provide them a phone a lot of them
had ownership of their own income and their own money um as for like spread of those ideas into
ms island like i mentioned a lot of a lot of the women we talked to they're not talking to
non-messiah people they thought that was outrageous to talk to someone who wasn't massage
there are people of course who do talk to namasai through business and that's something that phones
could do if women start using phones and business activities and to talk to people who are different
than them or if they have connections of like a son who lives in dhara salon
it could introduce some ideas like oh that's how other people do this thing um so that those
ideas could spread another thing that i did find interesting was that so when non-massage women
when they marry into a masai household they have a very interesting point of view because they have
uh more freedom shall we say all of a sudden they married into this really patriarchal system and
they just felt very frustrated that they're like wow this is completely different way of living
yeah that was a fusion of ideas and practices it's interesting to see how
phones will facilitate that and i think internet will be a big thing in the future for that
yeah i actually had two questions if you don't mind yeah of course uh what types of businesses
uh are women able to have because i know with uh in a little more structure that i mean it's
probably not more structured like in uh societies like that it's a little more difficult to for
someone to see a woman owning the business and actually go up and buy stuff from it
so what what business opportunities did they have and then my other question is kind of similar in
uh business uh and then how did the central like the solar panel uh place was that a
business itself or like did they run out time to charge your phone or how did that work uh very
good questions as well um so income generating business activities are permanent independent
and they were very specialized so one woman was like and even within the same household
people women would do different activities so they wouldn't overlap and compete for the same thing
but women would a lot of women sold like doughnuts and chat tea that was very specialized and there's
like a market day they would go there and sell other women would be like a middleman they would
go to farmers that weren't their husband because they weren't allowed to sell cops from their from
their own husband's farm they would go to another farmer and like hey can i sell this bag of beans
and i would be like okay and they would go salad and make a little bit of a profit off of that
so that was very widely done some women owned little shops where they sold
like soap and rice and sugar that wasn't as common but women did do that as well
and oh jewelry like making beads a lot of women did that especially during time of
year when there's a lot of ceremonies because it's very there's a lot of
really elaborate ceremonies that go on to celebrate um like age sets and everything
and then for the solar panels some women did
at their own at their own subhead so they would make that into their business they would charge
someone else 500 sharings which is like 50 cents here or something to charge a phone
um it wasn't really any schedule it was just a people show that they had a phone they would
they would charge it i don't know if you met them at the markets though
uh from where everyone i heard from people it's first come first serve
and i'm not sure it's just whatever was there um they would just charge them yeah thank
did you get to observe any of the male or the husband's attitudes towards their wives business
mission is and sort of if they're like a is a power relationship that exists today
yeah we we asked women um in a lot of the interviews like oh how does your husband
feel about you having a business and for most women that had a business uh they said their
husbands were okay with it like initially their husbands were a little i don't know about this
this is weird especially if the woman is asking her husband for money to start this business
um but when they see it being successful they're like oh yeah that's great let's get more money
into the household to use for whatever we need it to um and asking like how women got idea
the idea to start a business woman um they didn't really get it from talking to men they got it from
talking to other women and saying they need to go into america and see another one and do a business
yeah and one thing another thing interesting that we find when you come to women in business is that
they may be in business for a month but then the next eight months they might be out of business
because they have a baby but because they're they just don't have the money to start it because they
have to send other things so it just wasn't just because they had a business doesn't mean it was
a permanent business yeah did the men have any expectations for what their wives were
supposed to do like take care of the household take care of the children bring in business
take care of vegetable plants and things like that what were they expected to do yeah um
great question the the gender roles are pretty um explicit in inside communities for women they're
very much in charge of the household sphere they're in charge of their own sub-household
and building it and making sure it's clean making sure it's structurally stable they're in charge
i mean depending on the household but a lot of our purchasing most of the food for their children
some are in charge of paying the health our
education fees for their children but some husbands would help out with that
uh women while they don't own any livestock they do a lot of milking for the livestock so
that part of it they're they're in charge of that um men are primarily in charge
of yeah like livestock and really income generation would they then sell their milk
or yeah they would uh sell the milk or they would use it depending on the household what they would
maybe one more question then i want to give people a chance to
leave that disrupting everybody because it is 1 30. do we have one more question
wait this is your first one you've had three questions already just anybody
else have a question you can come up later i'm sorry i was just wondering
um you said there were low literacy and digital rates but of those people that you women that you
interviewed uh you didn't have i guess whatever level uh where was their primary source of like
education from was it the relationships that you mentioned for whether through other means
for women that didn't go to school yeah you mean yeah it was mostly just friendships from people
their relationships from talking to their friends or like their family growing up um and there were
there were some women that participated in adult education as well in some other communities
because ngo came in and that for a lot of women that was very life-altering for them because they
could learn how to read they could break down so yeah but mostly from their relationships
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