Okay I'm gonna go ahead and start. Hello everybody!
I am very happy to see you here and to have us all gathered. I'm uh Dr. Maria Elisa Christie.
I'm director of women and gender in international development at the center for international
research education and development, CIRED here at Virginia Tech. So welcome to our virtual
women and gender in international development discussion series. We are so happy you could
join us for our first event of this academic year and we're of course especially happy
for our speaker who I will introduce momentarily. Please note as you've seen in the slides that our
event is being recorded so if you are you're by staying on you're consenting to being recorded
but you can turn your camera off so if you don't want your image recorded um and then um
and then you won't be visually recorded. So before introducing our speaker I'd like to read our
the following land and labor acknowledgement statement that we have at Virginia Tech and
it was recently updated with input from the indigenous peoples group here at Virginia Tech. So
it's gotten longer those of you who were here last year when we did it but um I really appreciate the
detail. So Virginia Tech acknowledges that we live and work on the Tutelo/Monacan people's homeland
and we recognize that their continued relationships with their lands and waterways.
We further acknowledge that legislation and practices like the moral act of 1862
enabled the commonwealth of Virginia to finance and found Virginia tech through
the forced removal of native nations from their lands both locally and in western territories.
We understand that honoring native peoples without explicit material commitments fall short of our
institutional responsibilities through sustained, transparent and meaningful engagement with the
Tutelo/ Monacan peoples and other native nations. we commit to changing the trajectory of Virginia
Tech's history by increasing indigenous students staff and faculty recruitment and retention,
diversifying course offerings and meeting the growing needs of all Virginia tribes
and supporting their sovereignty. We must also recognize that enslaved black people generated
revenue and resources used to establish Virginia tech and were prohibited from attending until
1953. Through inclusive VT the institutional and individual commitment Ut prism that I may serve
in the spirit of community diversity and excellence we commit to advancing
a more diverse, equitable and inclusive community.
So the full calendar and any updates for this year's uh women and gender
development discussion series can be seen on our website and I believe Lumbini,
you're gonna put in the link to our website on there and in any case you can search for
us at Virginia tech women and gender development discussion series or just WGD. Some housekeeping
details, this discussion will last approximately 40 minutes the presentation from our speaker
will last approximately 20 minutes followed by about 20 minutes of discussion in Q/A.
All dialing participants will be muted to enable the speaker to present without interruption.
You're welcome to post your questions in the chat at any time and we will address them. I
will read from a list that you know we're going to be collecting them and then I will read them to uh
Dr. Cárdenas at the end but if you're thinking of things as she's speaking just go ahead and put
them in the chat. It won't interrupt anything. So and if we have time at the end after the questions
that have been put in um into the chat we'll open it up and we'll ask if anybody wants to raise
their hand using the I'll explain at that point but you know using the feature that zoom has um
and then you can speak either to make a comment or to ask a question directly to Dr. Cárdenas.
So in order for a discussion to be as rich as it can we need everyone to be respectful and treat
all participants with kindness and consideration without discriminatory behavior.
As I said this is being recorded and you will have access to it via our website. It will be
saved on the Virginia Tech's VT works library website and we'll link to it there.
And then I want to go ahead and say in advance um that we really appreciate
you filling out a very brief survey at the end that we'll put the link to in the chat as well.
You can tweet us by tagging us at WGD_VT. Alright now let me introduce our speaker Dr. Elisa
Cárdenas graduated from Iowa State University with a PhD in sustainable agriculture and sociology
and with a certificate in geographic information systems she works at the University of Missouri
in the center for applied research and engagement systems, CARES, as a research
specialist. Her research focuses on international development mostly related to women's empowerment
gender inequality, indigenous marginalization and intersectionality. Dr. Cárdenas's presentation on
this topic for our virtual women and gender development conference in February this year
won both the people's choice and the jury award for the four-minute flash talk presentation
competition that we had. We're very excited that's why we invited her to be our first speaker
and we're very excited to have her here today the title of her talk is gender and decision making
quinoa production among indigenous women in rural Ecuador. Please welcome Dr. Elisa Cárdenas.
Thank you so much. I may share my screen really quick
Get started
Alright well um can everybody hear me fine
Hello can everybody hear me
Okay oh I didn't see the thumbs up. Okay sounds great! um Well thank you um Maria
Elisa for introducing me. I am very excited to be part of this um like uh you mentioned I was
very pleased to hear that I was you know the recipient of two awards in February but also
being invited back this time. So I'm really happy to be here. I looked forward to sharing more about
my research when I was in the conference. It was a brief uh storytelling it was not necessarily so
technical so today I'm gonna be a little bit more uh academic if you can say that and so so it's the
same topic as my presentation for February but um uh just a little modification. So if you were there
this is a little complimentary information for that. uh so as you said uh Maria Elisa yes I am
a research specialist at CARES, a center for applied research and engagement at the
University of Missouri. um in this presentation particularly is part of my dissertation for my PhD
it's one of the papers and this one specifically focuses on gender um the picture you see here
this is something I would like for you guys to to notice is on the left is probably weed or barley
but this on the right is quinoa. That's the crop that I'm going to be talking about today. It's a
really beautiful crop right now it's just kind of young in this picture but I'm going to show you
here on the next one this is what the crop looks like when you're going to harvest it. So you let it
dry out on the stock and then you cut it and kind of pile it up and then it's going to be threshed
which is basically just separation of the stock from the seed so that's kind of another cool
picture just to see to show you the difference of the plant how it's harvested but this is just kind
of a little bit background. um like um Maria Elisa mentioned I work at the University of Missouri I
graduated from Iowa state and this is uh one of the papers that I'll be presenting for my PhD.
So for today I would like to talk a little bit about the research problem that I want to address
uh research questions some of the methodology that I use uh key findings and conclusions.
so the research problem um the indigenous women are crucial contributors to agriculture
production and Ecuador about 40 percent of production uh it's done by women
in Ecuador but they have substantial vulnerabilities as women that restrict their
opportunities for decision making and overall empowerment. For example gender norms place women
and men in different social roles behaviors and attitudes they are considered acceptable
appropriate or desirable in their communities and so men and women are often treated differently
and also often have different opportunities. So my research question is how does gender
influence indigenous women's decision making when producing quinoa in rural Ecuador.
The definition for decision making for this uh research I use different authors to kind
of draw on this but I describe it as the ability through which people determine priorities in their
household given contextual settings thereby impacting their pursuit in gold in agriculture.
So my research is specifically located in Ecuador as I mentioned
I always like to point out the Ecuador owns the Galápagos islands that's something that
some people may probably know but not always it's like a first thing you can think about because
Galápagos sometimes are represented at their own thing and so specifically this research is located
in Chimborazo. Chimborazo is uh in the Andes here if you can see my mouse the Andes go uh north and
south and it's specifically important to point out that is in the end is because this crop quinoa
production is unique to is an indigenous crop but unique to the area and so it specifically grows
in high altitudes and harsh environments and so that's part of the context of this research.
It's uh located in the province of Chimborazo as you can see here it has a high concentration
of indigenous people and so most of my participants were indigenous men and women
who were specifically from the Kichwa Puruhá group indigenous group that is specific to this area
and they are from a rural community and they were members of a cooperative. This cooperative
is an indigenous cooperative that specifically focuses on quinoa exports and so I wanted to
show you something really cool just kind of show you how they dressed up as a very important aspect
of identity how you dressed up and so women often dress up in some shawls they have long skirts they
have traditionally white hats but they also wear brown hats and men have dark hats a red poncho
and dark pants that's usually the traditional outfit for the area specifically that I study
and so for my data collection I had qualitative methodology um I was in Ecuador for five months I
was between harvest and planting seasons and that also means uh you know post harvest which means
threshing which is the separation of the stock in the seeds in polishing of the seed the seed
itself after being thrashed does not mean it's ready to go it still needs a little more
process to eliminate some of the toxins that it has actually has a coating that is called
saponin that requires a special wash to be able to be consumable for humans and so that's part of
also the post harvest process and then also the selling and the lamb preparation. I was
present in all these processes I had multiple data collection methods one was focus groups. I had uh
three focus groups one with women, one with men, one when men and women. I had 48 interviews um some of
them were with the indigenous producers and other ones where with the cooperative members and also
workers from the cooperative in key informants. They were either working with the cooperative
or knew about the cooperative and so that included government officials and also
representatives from their certifications .They had an organic certification and the fair trade
certification so I also had conversations with those key informants um I also analyzed private
and public documents. Some of them were from the cooperative, some of them were documents from the
government or publicly available online and uh one of the things that I found it was like one
of the most important things to combine with all these methods was observations you know I
asked about how do they uh describe how do they go about making decisions but it's one thing for them
to describe it to me in a different thing for me observing how those how they make those decisions.
So I was an important aspect of my methodology so for my key findings I had various uh
findings but I had three main ones that I would like to point out today so as a reminder my
research question was how does gender influence indigenous women's decision making when producing
quinoa in rural Ecuador. So one of the key findings I had was a feminization of agriculture which
means that this crop quinoa crop was initially a crop that was mostly male dominated and has
changed to be female dominated. I will tell you a little more about the context of this finding
specifically through quotes because my data is qualitative so rich data sometimes is better
described through the voice of the participants um and also the other key finding that I had
was that even though you know women wear them principal producers uh and I will tell you a
little bit of context of why that happened but even though they are principal producers
the decisions uh were described as jointly made as between men and women but final decisions were
often uh made by men um when it came about you know how do you describe your decision
making of how do you produce, how much do you produce, how often uh women will say we did
it together but when it comes to this but how did you do it, how did you go about it um it
was it was evident that men were mostly the ones who were the decision the final decision makers.
And the final uh one of the key findings that I also want to point out is religion religion
played an important role in how decisions were made and who was ahead of the household and so
those are the three important things to to keep in mind as you as we move along in this presentation.
So for my first key find it was feminization of agriculture that like I mentioned quinoa is a crop
that grows in harsh environments and that means um it there is a high altitude and where because of
the high altitude the sun is extremely strong uh there's harsh uh rain uh you know ice and
then also they often have their land on slopes and here this is an exception where it's more
mostly flat but you can see there's fog and this is like normal really early in the morning because
we're kind of high in the elf in in the mountains so it's it's over uh it's about eight thousand
feet just gonna give you a perspective and it used to be uh gender crop it was because it's still it
used to be a male crop that's what I meant and the reason why I know this is because the cooperative
membership when the cooperative started which was in the 70s which used to be mostly man and so uh the
membership and now the membership is actually about 50 50. But even though there's 50 50 um
women are still the ones who do the production even though their husbands are the ones who
are registered as members. So it is a crop that is by by women part of the reason why there is
this feminization or culture which is like the most important aspect of my finding is that men
have migrated out of the city because this crop has used to and still does generate income but now
is not sufficient for their house for their their living conditions but it still generates income so
they still interested in producing uh but men have now gone to the city in their work in construction
their drivers and so those uh jobs provide some income but they still want to have an extra
income and they still engage in quinoa but now it's no longer a male crop is a female crop
As I mentioned so there's a lot of migration for men and women are now in charge of this production
but how does feminization or culture is viewed by the participants this is
an interesting quote that I want to read to you is it says by a man it's called sample is their
fictional names. Women work in construction which is difficult work for women and so they women
stay here in the farm and work with the animals in quinoa it is less risky work also because
of the children are in school they women take care of the lunch and all the housework. So this is an
important quote to kind of really understand and kind of visualize what is that uh men
obviously i cannot generalize but generally this is like a really good quote that kind of
summarizes overall findings that men really see as women staying at home they go the
men are the breadwinners they go out and the women stay in the house and that also means production
of quinoa. There's a perspective from a woman too. She said, we women work and care for agriculture
even though there are men who are members in the cooperative the wives are the ones who do
the work men go to the city to the often jobs and unfortunately the ones who stay in the house are
women. This is another really good oh now this is a perspective of a woman women themselves also see
themselves as the ones who will stay at house and who the men will be leaving the house and earn
a different income and so this is an important aspect for finding for the feminization of our
culture that where says you know women are the ones who say and produce quinoa but even though
this production was previously done mostly by men or it was a membership mostly by men.
My other finding was about decision making as I mentioned before so gender is an important
influencer into decisions for example head of the household are men I'm considering men like when
I asked uh all the participants male and female who said the head of the household uh were men
and part of the the kind of the understanding or the description of why our man the head of the
household I often came from religious beliefs and so I had some interesting uh descriptions of why
men were head of the house. So one was uh well the head of the church is a man so
men are the ones who are the the ones we need to you know follow and obey um then in the in the
bible women came from the roof of a man so women women have to comply with um decisions in men's uh
opinions and so religion often came as part of their description of who is the head of the
household and why a man was head of the household. Now when it came to decision making men and women
will say the decisions were made jointly meaning that men and women had a saying
about how decisions were made and that was that was correct uh when it came to decisions women
and men engage in conversations about how things needed to be done, when do they need to be done.
Now the important distinction through this qualitative work was that final decisions were
often done by men. So let's say I'm going to show you here a quote but women will say yeah we make
decisions together but we make we discuss things together but then when it came to how long it was
often a husband who decided how long she needed to make an activity or a production or something
like that. So I'm going to show you some quotes they're really interesting can I really show you
how is that decision making was described and so a woman Sarah said decisions are made through
conversations with my husband about what we will do during the day. We always need to discuss about
the activities and resources in the farm. For example he will ask what are you going to work on
up there then I will say planting so he will say you go work on that but until this time.
So this is really as you know a small description and a differentiation of saying we
talk about it but when it comes to know how long he decided how long. So this is one example there's
this other example that was also interesting so I asked so who makes decisions about production
and she will say I decided with my husband he helps with decisions for example for planting
he says go plant this type of amount of crop here or there he decides and so I say oh so he decides
and then she says of course we both discussed it when I'm working anywhere I let him know about it
for example sometimes he calls and says wait for me I am coming to eat breakfast when he calls
I need to wait for him. So this is another good example to really show you that women and men
engage in conversations but when it comes to really how things are being done at the end final
decisions are often made by men and so for overall like as a general idea for my findings how do they
all connect what does that mean for feminization of agriculture so women are principal quinoa
farmers yes they're the ones who produce all the crap uh men well sometimes on the weekends or when
there's like a harvest or planting what is like a really important labor uh intensive activity they
will participate but generally speaking women are the ones who are in charge of all the production
now men are head of the household and that often meant that they were the final decision makers too
even when they were absent in the farm. So in terms of decision making there is literature that says
you know decision making in Ecuador is joint. Men and women participated in this to surveys there
has been mostly of the data but now if I do this qualitative data obviously I cannot generalize
this but if I do through a qualitative data and understanding like uh to through the producers the
descriptions and even making observations about it it looks like um decision that discussions
are being made between men and women but not necessarily final decisions. So gender impacts
a lot is impacted by religious beliefs and gender is an important influence for decision making so
women are at disadvantage when it comes to decision making and overall empowerment.
So in terms of feminization of our culture women engage in production but not necessarily are
also the decision makers. They're still share that decision and often are not the main decision
makers either so that's an important aspect of their influence to their opportunities for
you know as a producer you know if you are the main producer and you still have to
rely on um another person to really make decisions which sometimes you might know a little bit better
about production you might know you might have more uh you'll be more aware of what is really
happening at the field and so it can be you know limiting for if you can say for you to not
be able to make decisions on your own when you might have information to make those decisions.
So overall uh gender effects indigenous women's decision making and opportunities and of their
own power and it was a big influence of how women were perceived or who is the head of the
household who has the the stronger voice about how things are being done in the farm so increasing
awareness about local context such as religion and labor dynamics when creating future programs
and policies is important to really improve the quality of life of indigenous women and
indigenous families in general the policies and programs should focus on indigenous women's unique
struggles to effectively improve their access and use of resources to increase the quality of life
and um that's an important aspect. I also before I conclude anything I wanted to show you
so when I was there I saw this chicken and I was just like oh that's an interesting chicken. I was
like it looks familiar and then my husband came to visit and I was like oh it looks like my husband
and so yeah I have to take a picture and show you all. And this is a plan as well
at the beginning I show you the plan that it was kind of just green this is when it starts
flowering so this is in between the harvest and then when it starts growing and I wanted
to show you that as well and if anybody has any questions please feel free to ask me. Thank you!
Thank you very much Dr. Cárdenas! um so we've got three questions. So I'll go ahead and get you
started with that one is from your advisor Dr. Ann Oberhauser so hold on let's see my cursor has uh
okay my cursor is crazy so Dr. Oberhauser says are there instances
well first she said this was something this is great contextual background to the study
are there instances when women migrate to urban areas for economic activities
how widespread is this and what impact does this have on household decision making?
Yes that's a good question um in terms of the community that I particularly work with
uh one important aspect to it was also age a lot of the participants were more mature
audience or even older people. So women didn't necessarily left the house because of that
but there were some women who at some point who were more like younger let's say in their 50s
who did had some employment outside the farm and went to the city
but they often came back to the farm so there was um I guess to to kind of answer the question like
the uh production of quinoa itself either happened when the woman was there because
the husband always engaged in construction or outside activities or when she was also gone
there was just simply not production of quinoa much because women were the ones in charge of that
so uh but it didn't really happen at least none of the participants I was with
because most of them were elder and they didn't so most women didn't sleep at all they never
left their their communities so often if women would leave it's an important aspect too where
I had a little more education and that not necessarily happened to all of them too so.
Before I read the next question and in case this gets swallowed over I'm going to read
aloud the comment from George Obeng. He said I loved your contextual description, great
job in my perspective and I worked in rural Ghana I think most of these decision-making conversations
are just made for the men to give orders to the women about their
family households economic activity. This phenomenon has been a key reason
why some gender empowerment programs tend to fail in rural communities.
Yes um yeah that's something that I was pretty surprised about because in the literature before I
left most of the findings that I found for Ecuador specifically was the decision makers were joined
and so and it's an interesting aspect because it kind of like sometimes oversimplifies things like
if there is a joint decision making then it's assumed women are automatically empowered uh
but it's also important to understand the context I how are those decisions being made
not necessarily whether women and men that both say yes we do it together and so this is really
an important example of that that yes the literature says that you know women and men engage
in the joint decision making but how does that happen and really how final decisions are being
made and how they engage into that it's an important aspect to really see that
it might not be equal or it really is it really joint when final decisions are being done by
the men too. That's a good point. I'm going to read Daniel had posted a decision-making question
as well Daniel Sumner so how do you think NGOs and public sector agencies focused on enhancing
women's agency over farm and household decisions could utilize qualitative methods to document
changes in household decision-making dynamics? How could these qualitative approaches be applied
together with quantitative approaches to unpack quote joint decision making? Well I think that's
a really good point. uh one of the things that I uh I would say is it's not just qualitative
research it's about understanding the area that you're in uh so it's about really
whatever organization you're is trying to apply a program or try to understand a location
it's about uh you know I study this community uh it's unique to them perhaps or it might be
modernized to other communities as well but it's really contextual so that's one of the
things is that the qualitative part is just to really understand the context you live in so
dynamics might be different uh you know in community uh dynamic you know
activities would be different so I think it is important to include this so to to answer
that it is an important aspect to include in uh program in policy application uh it's
it's um it becomes a little more tricky because there's so many contacts that you can think of
and there's just so much you can do but I think a cookie cutter is definitely not the answer.
So I'm going to read my question which is kind of follows up on that kind of similar
that I posted and that is so the feminization of agriculture narrative is often simplified to
conclude that when women become the principal farmers for their household so the men have
left and whether out of the country or to the city or whatever they're more empowered so it's
you know it's the women are empowered narrative which is part of one of the two narratives but
do you have methodological recommendations for people doing research in this area that will allow
them to get a better understanding of women's empowerment in such a context? Yeah one of the
things that is important to to point out is that empowerment is unique to me it's unique to each
one of you so empowerment is really sometimes very personal and sometimes can be a little
bit generalized into groups and communities but uh and because of that it's part of the
qualitative work you know really understand how do people describe what is empowerment to them
and how do they experience empowerment and how they think they can be more empowered too. So
one of the important uh kind of narratives of empowerment is that empowerment cannot be given
empowerment you give it to yourself it can be facilitated but it have to be to yourself
but part of it is also talking to people really facilitating different ways through interviews
or do observations through focus groups where people feel more and more comfortable to really
visualize what is empowerment because sometimes it's something that has to be clicked in your
head and once it's done then it cannot be taken away and and so i will say qualitative work is an
important aspect to really understand how people experience it and uh understand it too. Great!
Thank you uh George Obeng posted a question he asked do the women have groups where they need to
talk through or help one another on their farming activities and how do men influence the activities
of these women's groups if they do exist? Well they as I mentioned they were part of a cooperative and
so the cooperative itself it's compressed of men and women and so there are activities that
are provided by the cooperative or organized by the cooperative to learn new strategies or
to engage into kind of new new new uh new techniques about quinoa or to learn about what
problems other people are having so and often it's between men and women and this is something that I
actually will I'm glad this brings right out because his meetings are uh mostly
attended by women because they're the producers and because men are working
somewhere else uh but often facilitated by uh men and women and the quinoa
cooperative has a lot of men leaders and so a lot of this conversations when I was present
there uh the people who talked the most were men not women even though most of the attendees were
women and so to answer that no there isn't really a gender focus uh meeting there but uh even when
there are meetings about sharing information if men were present often where the dominant speakers.
Thank you. We have a question from Rebecca Chin says thanks for the presentation
and were your results shared back with the community if so how did the women
react to insights some insights about men's role versus women's role in the joint decision making?
Yes actually that's part of my goals. I um I was I shouldn't say very recently graduated but I
graduated within the last um less than a year and last December and so one of my goals is to
in one of not just my goals but actually one of the things that I
um promised the cooperative and the members was to share my results and so that's
will be interesting to share how that would be a reaction for them they're like I mentioned there's
three parts to it this is a gender focus so my paper situation is not is it's about indigenous
women but it's not just genders focus it's also it talks about also indigeneity so I also think about
like the intersectionality of those two ideas and also talk about the cooperative. So it'll be three
different kind of reports if you you can say so it will be interesting to see I don't know how
they react and I think it will be an interesting thing to also learn about how that will come about.
Okay, so I don't see any more questions posted in the chat did I so um 'd like to invite people who
would like to make comments um pretend this is a discussion series it's not just a Q/A grilling
the speaker and of course it's harder to do that in zoom than if we if we're in a room with our
chairs in a circle but um I'd like to invite you um under reactions at the bottom one of
the reactions is raise your hand so let's see that's clap uh I don't see my raise my hand but um
raise your hand should be there well in any case even if I just did uh
even if you just did a thumbs up I don't know if anybody knows how to do the raise your hand but if
you would like to have a comment or ask a question orally um I think we need to take you off mute. So
you need to raise your hand to do so um Daniel if you know how to tell people how to do the
raise their hand icon. I think Dr. Oberhauser has something okay yes she's actually raising her hand.
Physically raising my hand thank you so much it's really exciting to share this with all of you 0:38:45.000,1193:02:47.295 um so Elisa and I kind of have an inside scoop, I must admit but it might be interesting to share
um some of the literature and some of the kind of key references around women's empowerment
around some of the household aspects with the with the group if people are doing this
type of research and kind of what are some of the really key authors in literature that helped you
with your research? Yeah I actually um I said I was not going to share the PowerPoint just
because of publications but I definitely have at the end of it I have my references there
so I can share that and uh that's definitely whoever's interested
please ask Daniel to to share that with you because I have that, so that's a good question.
Anybody else? So the reactions at the bottom of it it has the raise
hand feature there there I'm raising mine for example and then I can lower my hand
anybody raising their hand here? Any comments? Or you can make them in the chat as well
Daniel oh I guess I again as you iterated during your fantastic presentation at least the
importance of context and how that really matters especially as as approaches narratives around
empowerment and gender transformative approaches are being perpetually promoted in our rural
development and agricultural development discourse that the importance of understanding the context
is foundational to those approaches. I just really um I think your presentation does a really
fantastic job of highlighting the importance of that context and how that contextual information
is needs to be the basis of such efforts and that without that information those efforts won't have
that desired improvement for women and and men as well yeah definitely I think as also the
combination um I think secondary data or survey data it's so helpful and useful and helps you
get a lot of understanding of what's happening but the qualitative side of it really like dig that
digs deep into really how people engage in those conversations how do people experience things and
how people want to improve our or you know however they feel about their situation you know. So yeah
it's a combination of both definitely. We have an another question came in from George Obeng. He'd uh
like to know what impact does your work seek to have in the lives of the women? Well part of uh the
many reasons for the the uh for me studying uh women's empowerment specifically now is indigenous
women's empowerment which is also more specific and that is not necessarily us talked about in
the literature uh is to at least for now is to bring awareness that um it's is a simplification
just to think about uh many people as to one identity or one umbrella is they're different
umbrellas you you are I for me I am not just a woman I'm a woman an international woman uh I
am you know I have my privileges, education but I also have my disadvantages. So it's important
to understand how vulnerable populations have opportunities or disadvantages because of their
identity so that's part of the goals that I have is to bring awareness that your identities
can benefit you but also can be diminishing and more more more even more when you have multiple
vulnerable identities and so that's part of the the awareness that I would like to bring at least
for now and ideally inspire uh for better policies for protection of those populations
I'm going to turn the emceeing over to Daniel but I do want to point out that Lumbini
our graduate student assistant put the link in for the short survey but I don't want to
rush people we still actually have 10 minutes um so um thank you everybody for coming but I'm
going to turn it over to Daniel please continue your conversation any oral conversation or chat
and thank you Elisa!
Let's see here real quick um
Oh I'm going to go ahead and read off since we had one more question from Angela here Elisa real
quick from the chat so she's wondering if there were were there specific health education birth
outcomes that were unique to women in rural Ecuador that could be informed by this study?
um and feel free um Angela to come off mute your yourself and kind of restate that question as well
in our dialogue here as well but thank you for that question. I think yeah I think I understand
the question I think that's a really good question like I mentioned this is one of three of the
articles that I have for my dissertation uh and the other aspect that I also didn't talk in the
gender paper but I talked about in my indigenous identity paper was education one important
characteristic about rural indigenous people is often having high illiteracy rates
women particularly have higher illiteracy rates than men and older women even higher illiteracy rates
so it's not just being indigenous it's not just being indigenous women it's about being
older indigenous women and so it's important also location and it's also about education
for sure in terms of health I didn't really see much about it but yeah age education
and location absolutely were highly influential to those characters as well
excellent yeah I guess um before we close our um presentation I have I've kind of selfishly
have one kind of more interesting to your experience at least it was um
this part of women's department also coupling with engaging men in these conversations around
decision making I guess in general what your observation was men's perspective on this type
of work this research that you were doing and kind of what maybe opportunities do you see maybe where
men could be more actively engaged in shifting these these norms around decision making yeah well
I and to answer the first one what was their men's perspective about my research I actually had uh
interesting experiences let's say um for example when i went to interview women and a husband
happened to be there it was really difficult for the husband to leave and so he was present and so
I know for a fact that some of those answers at least at some point because they were not present
all the time I tried to really maintain that distance um were influenced how women responded to
and so that was um and it was not necessarily they were like oh you're talking with women or are you
talking about gender equality and I'm against it it was more like this kind of like head of
the household persona that was I'm in charge and I need to know what's happening kind of level
that it's part of part of the culture but also you know it really proves was that I'm trying
to point out you know the women wouldn't feel comfortable and they wouldn't be able to talk
on their own too um but I think part of and then to the second one part of this you ask is like
how can men can engage more in this um to be more open-minded or to at least be more engaging into
more equal decision making I think part of it um that I think I'm not sure if that's really
interesting exactly your question but I think one of the limitations is that um there's oh
there's another part of the Angela that actually a language barrier too so education was another
thing language very women older women tend to have extremely limited Spanish they had their own
you know indigenous language quechua but um because they were not really connected to the
city because they didn't have much education all these like variants will also limit their
opportunities to practice or to speak Spanish which was the national language to sell stuff
to get education you know to so many things and so and going back to what you said Daniel is that you
know it that one that's one of the problems that you know if women themselves don't have this uh
sometimes language they have a language barrier they have don't have the education sometimes that
can unfortunately mess up with their self-esteem and with their their feeling of like you know
feeling empowered or feeling have their own um uh security to make decisions to to be uh you know
sure that something needed to be done and so I feel that's also a dynamic part where uh because
of this like uncertainties of women it's easier to also for them in to take over um obviously this is
just kind of something that I didn't necessarily study and like have a conclusion in my this my
dissertation but I do believe that you know educational language barrier was also a barrier
for women to really be sure about decisions and for men to to equally participate on this dynamics
I know thank you so much Elisa um if I if there's anyone else that has a has a comment or or
question for Elisa um please take take a moment now I'll give just a few moments
for if there's anyone else that wants to come off mute or type their question in the chat
Excellent! I just see some a lot of like well with like from from from Rachel congratulations and I
guess I will I will say there now if everyone who doesn't know how to use the reaction feature or at
least just give a come off you put your video on and just kind of give Elisa a very virtual round
of applause and thank her so much for joining us today and leading us into this wonderful
presentation and kind of getting stimulating our thinking around these topics of empowerment
gender dynamics and decision making I know I really enjoyed today's
presentation thank you again I'm biased no thank you so much but one thing I do want to say is that
for my presentation it was extremely important to also have men's voices and men's opinions
about it to really see different perspectives so something I wanted to also point out that it's
important to have different perspectives not just you know what women think experience but
also one how many see it as well and that was an important aspect of my research as well so
yeah thank you so much for having me I really appreciate it I had a great time and I hope
you all had uh you know a good information and if you had any questions please I'm gonna share
my screen really quick and please you know talk to me I'm happy to see my email I should probably put
my email there so yeah but my I'm gonna send it through my message to the messages yeah well if
you have to just drop them the chat and again feel free to follow up and as always probably
in the next week or so we will have a recording posted on VTech works of of uh Dr. Elise Cárdenas
presentation and we'll be circulating that out again through through our twitter and on the the
website as as well we'll have that information and so again um uh our graduate uh assistant Lumbini
Barua has been posting the link we do appreciate if you just take a few moments after today to
complete our post event survey um and also we would welcome you to have us join us for our other
WGD discussion series presenters uh the rest of this fall in October we're going to be welcoming
Dr. Kathy Colverson from the university of Florida and the livestock systems innovation lab
and continue to check our website and twitter for more updates um with that I just want to say have
a wonderful day everyone and and thank you for joining us and take care and stay safe everyone
Bye take care everyone
Awesome
Thank you for joining us stay in thanks joseph thanks Hannah excellent and we've got a record