Our first panel is a critical lenslic conference,
it illustrates how, despite the focus on women,
through much of our conference,
men and gender relations are at the heart of our discussion.
The speakers, who also bring a critical lens to
this development enterprise as
whole and consider other peer
power variables for that risk.
I'm going to go ahead and introduce
the three speakers that
we'll have, and we'll hear from one.
Dr. Caroline Faria is an Assistant Professor
at the Department of Geography and the Environment
at the University of Texas at Austin.
As a graduate of that department myself,
I'm very excited to have [inaudible]
[LAUGHTER] Dr. Faria is a feminist,
political, and cultural geography,
working on gender and nationalism.
Her research is focused on
the US-based South Sudanese diaspora
and contemporary processes of
gender development, and
nation-building that have emerged since
the signing of the 2005
Sudanese Comprehensive Peace Agreement.
Currently, she's working on a project following
the commodity chain of synthetic
agreement hair production,
distribution, and consumption of East Africa.
Her work was published in such journals as Gender,
Place and Culture, and
also the Association of American Geographers,
Transactions of The Institute of British Geographers,
Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space, and GeoForm.
I never introduced you one at a time,
welcome Dr. Faria.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much, Maria Elisa and the
folks at CIRED c-v for inviting me here today.
I'm thrilled to be here,
It was so lovely to get the invitation.
I'm very excited to
get a chance to spend a little time
with the hostess of this year's event.
Had a sneak peek this morning
and there's lots of [inaudible] going on there,
that I'm not supposed to say.
I also want to thank actually Boaz and Erica,
the new brains, reading all
schedules, so wherever you are, thank you so much.
Maria Elisa asked me to give a paper
that came out few years ago as
part of an anniversary edition,
for a really important collection, to
paraphrase and [inaudible] work I am involved in,
which is that historically.
It was a special issue in honor of
a collection that came out in 1994.
That year was about 20 years in the making.
It's a piece that co-author with my
colleague at the urban UT, University of Toronto,
Sharlene Mollett, who works on gender,
and race, and land rights and the rest.
It brings together her work with my own
on [inaudible] in South Sudan.
We were called on in that special issue
to think about how contemporary work on affect and
emotion, speaks to [inaudible] stand that existing
feminist, geographical, political, methodology.
In our particular piece,
we want to show race recognition of
the critical work on race and
racialization in our work as having a stroke.
One thing I've learned is that
it's really an intervention,
it's the work with that histography.
But I was so interested to hear [inaudible].
How relevant this is for your own field
and I'm putting this view,
I'm doing partitioning of this phase work.
The landmass special issue
of the professional geographer,
women in the field critically balance methodologies,
theoretical perspective.
Interrogated and now well debated set of
feminist queries concerning power and knowledge.
Since then, five of
the feminist geographic scholarship has
enriched methodological theory even further.
Feminist geographers with them development in
and from the Global South have
valuably contributed to these phase.
Particular insights around me and portable picks and save
your library could use
through development, discourse, and practice.
Some, fewer than these geographers,
has situated contemporary research of history of empire,
advocating for post colonial methodologies to redress
lingering asymmetries of power in all this.
Fewer than important, rich interrogations of
the process of development and
its connections with race and racialization,
along with various other fault [inaudible].
Color sustained feminist geographic attention to
race as its shapes the recess process remains limited.
Here we take seriously the quote of
Kobayashi and Peake in their rise in Central America.
They quote, "Racialization is part of
a normal and normalized landscape
and needs to be analyzed as such."
Surely then too, this is an imperative
for geographic research in the global South,
with this own deeply racialized in
geographically specific colonial
and neo-colonial through the intervention.
Why then in our otherwise theoretic and sophisticated,
a practice orient to
feminist geographic debate around the methodology,
and 20 years after [inaudible] came out, there's
a relative silence that exist around racial power,
rather than racial difference.
This suggests the solution is
found in the worst of survivors.
After Franklin [inaudible] of this,
and there's a long standing
close to the genealogy of work
here, have that [inaudible].
We understand with whiteness,
not as fixed biologically pre-determined phenotype,
but as a structure of the continent,
stands to a point to a percent
historical for cultural practices.
Positioned as a non-category normal,
natural, what Bonilla Silva
describes as a racial grammar.
Whiteness becomes invisible. This
invisibility is hefty, where as Kobayashi and et al note ,
the weak acidity between
the whiteness of the social world
as our object distribute
and the whiteness at the visible part,
as our medium obsolete, operates and
make a pay for whitening process.
This race is absoluteled certain for
analysis of gender, culture and class.
In turn, analysis of race rarely interrogate whiteness.
Yet, whiteness reassert how we shape
some of these global south.
Taking seriously Kobayoshi's efforts to untangle
whiteness is making whiteness
acts machinations visible,
including in our world.
To do so, we finally spoke
these colonial feminism that are deliberate in
case to help coloniality and
whiteness continue to shape knowledge production,
and that explicitly white against the [inaudible].
In connection, we're deeply
influenced by intersectional thinking of how
that recognizes gender and race
are always producing that kind of difference.
Together, these overlapping strands
of theory push for historically and
geographically contingent and complexity
realization in our own research and content.
We put this body of work into
conversation with Tolia-Kelly and authors, who
work on affect and emotion contribute, which
has a long absence of grace and
its own analysis to insist to quote Tolia-Kelly, that race
is necessarily a matching of affect and
effect does not work instantly oppress.
So with this framing in mind,
that you move out of this theory
and it's fields or rather kept field on
all this theory making it,
thank you for the props to you that.
I begin with Kobayashi, Mits direction.
"To understand and resist sexism and racism,
we need to unmatch the live landscapes on
which gender and racialised relations are played out".
This project is complex,
and particularly said that Sudan and South Sudan.
But I wanted to speak a little bit now about some of
the ways that this particular field site
is bound up with race,
racial power, and the vote of rights.
From 1899-1955, Sudan's Anglo-Egyptian condominium,
primarily undiversified the British.
This colonial history was markedly rationalized with
white and white bodies and
practices associated with whiteness,
promoted a civilized modern and
superior to indigenous value systems.
In the last 30-40 years,
the US has become increasingly
powerful in Sydney's affairs.
Providing humanitarian, military and
development aid during the following Civil War,
assisting in peace talks, and
receiving refugees for permanent settlement.
The motivations are buried,
there are histories that
racialized colonial interests in intervention.
Access to oil and mineral resources in
the region also interested Canada,
China, Malaysia, and others from the UK.
A sense of Christian religious connection and
a growing geo political awareness
towards the government of Sudan,
with the escalation of the war on terror.
The relations with Egypt, the Middle East,
also shapes up Sudan's colonial history.
For centuries, perhaps millennia
long transparent slave trade,
and idle to people is one example that
continues to contemporary simplified,
racialized privatization of North and South.
These divisions were reinforced post independence by
a series of Sudanese governments [inaudible] in valleys,
regional ethnic groups, and
Islamic religious sects to
the significant modernization itself.
The category of Arab here,
relies much complexity as this part of the power of race.
Masking histories and intermarriage,
reality and trade, amidst ethnic and religious diversity.
Moreover, enough skills ongoing state violence against
people in all parts of Sudan, including Arab-Muslims.
Yet distinct everyday discourse is promulgated
by the state and civil society rely
on these categories to position
them as inferior to their Africanness,
their blackness, and
their non-Muslim religious beliefs and practices.
The skill site then has racialized histories
and geographies and engage in [inaudible] in local north.
Yet local manifestations of whiteness give
meaning to whiteness as a political process,
a condition that, as I now speak to you,
is also always [inaudible] .
Working in South Sudan,
my citizenship, class, education,
appearance and the very fact of my
being there all threatened on this economy.
This privilege prompted feelings of trust, care,
and curiosity amongst respondents,
facilities, and research in newer ways.
This was not however natural nor inevitable.
After Nia, the seemingly
knowable object white movement or black woman,
cannot be understood outside of
a specific historical and geographical processes
that constitute the subjectivity as intelligible.
In South Sudan, whiteness takes form
in the life of a legacy British colonialism
I read, please write.
My temporary presence of US,
American, and European development workers,
yet interrogating whiteness
insists upon racial habitability,
military emergence, it's shifting affect.
Whiteness and colonial passive presence that give it
meaning certainly intended and enriched and entitlement,
but could also above negative
less faults lowered [inaudible]
For example, my research
involved participant observation with
a modestly [inaudible] women empowerment organization,
now based in South Sudan,
but led by south Sudanese US settled refugees.
To a certain extent,
a common sensed woman would help to build solidarity.
However, this was partly mediate
by my whiteness which associated me with
the international development industry and prompted
varying emotive reactions
from research participants.
A key element of the organization's work
was to build a woman's Civil Society Network,
requiring meetings with small groups
across countries to space their challenges.
Frustrations with development organizations
were often led by the women.
The complexities of grant guidelines,
the favoring of certain groups over others,
the donor rather than community-driven projects,
and their use of unpaid service providers.
In these moments, I
sometimes became target of those element,
either directly or via colleagues in my absence.
My presence in these suspicions also prompted nervousness
and distress, [inaudible] pulled back.
At other times, my whiteness was found
[inaudible] incurred upon the South Sudanese,
this word leadership heightening some confusion,
and tension, and then place
the particularly integrate a multi-day conference.
A group of women responded to remind us that there were
no DMs available with South of disbursement,
frustration, and disbelief. How could they prove
"Americans fails have been reported."
They had seen a signed checks for entertainers,
food, transportation. Why not the map?
They can act many hours of discussion.
Those slowly began to lead [inaudible].
One woman had grown close to me
over the onwards thing workshop thing,
but she left in tears, shaking her head at me.
A group of five women stayed behind however,
sitting inside of protests for many hours into the day,
and to the night, and the following day.
Though the organization's leaders had
worked hard to mitigate this outcome,
carefully laying out expectations prior to the event,
and seeking to build a relationship
with solidarity rather than patronage.
The associations of whiteness and privilege
sometimes proved frustratingly intractable.
The incident was wrenching for participants,
organizers, and myself, there
were different ways for different reasons.
It starkly demonstrated
our asymmetric populations of power.
While I and a number of leaders who went on to
hold significantly powerful positions in
government would subsequently benefit
from there and power career advancement,
they would not be reimbursed for their own labor.
This despite the precedent
set by the development industry,
and the fact that they had set aside
family with work related responsibilities,
and travel far many, many days to attend.
That my body elicited
such immense reactions was in
part due to the Whiteness I share
with the government practitioners now operating in
South Sudan whom I knew before, but many.
Yet it's also bonded with
the prolonged positioning of Whiteness
in Sydney's racial objects.
As [inaudible] warns, postcolonial
readings version risk presentism and
if we're marginalizing on the seven days of
colonialism spatialty to
make assumptions about the sameness of
imperial and colonial geographies.
Historically, part of the combined British-Egyptian rule,
contemporary South Sudan is
also bounded with that rules;
the government in North Sudan,
North Africa, and the Arab world.
In this setting, we want
the Arabic dialect, religious practice, threats,
and the experience to particularly
propose one alongside or in due
of fair skin color to
produce a particular expression of White privilege.
For many [inaudible] needs,
these bodies reared with Arab are inextricably
tied to memories of spectacular and mundane oppression,
exploitation, violence, and surveillance.
This emerged as salient in the fields of
deep distrust and suspicion of my brown body,
and its associated with Arabs having
both strength [inaudible].
The standard we pass,
this has been particularly apparent when we search
relations between women's groups and
the same series of Sudan and South Sudan.
For example, at the start of my observation with
the women's league Sudan Liberation Movement,
the primary resistance group during the second civil war,
I clearly sense partisans in hostility.
Although I've been formally welcomed,
the air in our own meetings felt thick with tension.
Worried, I asked my cell student
to collaborate about this.
She responded frankly and with some humor that she
still had to spend time persuading them I wasn't an Arab,
that I was a friend to them and to the government,
that I could be trusted.
Though I was puzzled at first,
this is the reaction I came to face innumerable times
both in South Sudan and
amongst the South Sudanese diaspora in US.
In these moments of racial reading in Sweden,
I at first reacted defensively,
distancing myself from development industry,
resituating myself as an activist,
offering reassurances I was British with dire needs,
but no, not terrified.
I was more than that. But in time,
I moved away from anxious efforts of correction.
Instead reflecting on, I would share,
but differently grouped to
anxieties and what they suggested
about frustrating development practices
and their colonial efforts,
and the racialized geopolitical relations
between the two Sudans.
In the context of women's organizing,
I noticed, for example,
the associations with Arabics with
distress were not only direct with me,
but also it stimulates women too by way
of specific performances to the accent of the Arabic,
their name, and aspect they addressed up the North.
It was only through the racialized
feelings in my own body,
both in the context of women's organizing, that
I came to recognize this as
one significant roadblock in building with solidarity
across very ethnic regional communities between
so many women in those areas of North Sudan and Darfur.
They self-deny it.
It transpires that Whiteness or Blackness is
not attached to respective white and black bodies,
but rather that race signs
are included into everyday practice.
Part of this everyday practice
is the research encounter itself.
To close, Kobayashi argues that to
be effective needs to color the field in
such a way that the politics of difference transcend
sexual categories and disrupt their means of power,
but remain the historical basis of
[inaudible] present-day change for this.
Geographically contingent histories of
race undoubtedly mock the researching counter.
To reflect on this,
we've interrogated the workpiece of Whiteness,
including, most certainly, my own.
We sent the Whites for two key reasons.
Firstly, to visit the [inaudible] by
initiating an unnatural discourse [inaudible] Kobayashi.
Tracing its relationality between
different history, settings, and bodies.
This refuses its relation in analysis of power,
even when race seems irrelevant or absent because,
for example, the setting is the birth of North,
one will assume racial imaginative
and/or amongst those [inaudible].
Secondly, this troubles assumptions that arise
with due reflect on race and research,
highlighting the mobilities of Whiteness,
its shifting performances and meanings embedded in class,
and to unknown activity; Christianity,
nationalism, masculinity, to name a few,
destabilized race in the field and
from the bodies of researchers and participants.
This move proved to be [inaudible] and
that racial power cannot be misstated
simply through acknowledgment and the politics.
Instead, through the strategy,
race may be unfixed and rendered the natural.
Attending to the emotionality,
race is part of this deconstructed project,
As feminist [inaudible] thinking through
our coloring in the field,
including those very emotional reactions
to our own moving bodies, as says [inaudible] ,
complicates the simplistic live of
their oppressive [NOISE] specific boundaries
around which race is too often fixed
and racial authority breed over.
It also deepens our understanding
of racial politics shaping.
In the case of Schelling's work,
Land Rights in Central America,
land work problems organized in South Sudan.
But this is not to suggest
our inverted racial ambiguity of these inherent insights.
Doing so exemplifies the kind
of essentialist move we ride against.
Rather, I would suggest that all our bodies are
racially ruly and natural to
interrogate this unruliness contributes to
critical knowledge production in geography,
and binds a factual [inaudible] pedological
theory and practice. [APPLAUSE]
Thank you Dr. Faria.
We're going to go ahead and move onto the next speaker,
so hold the questions till the end of this.
Our next speaker is Jane Kato-Wallace,
Director of Programs at Promundo.
Very happy to have Jane.
The only NGO speaker with us.
Promundo is a very important NGO
focusing on [inaudible] so I welcome, Jane.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you all, particularly to the conference organizers,
for this really kind invitation,
and I'm really excited to see how the rest of
the conference unfolds over these next couple of days.
As many of them would say,
I'm going to be taking a much more practitioner
focus to how we see the work with men and boys,
how that relates to working on gender equality,
and more broadly, with the [inaudible] programs.
But to start out, Promundo, who are we?
We are an organization that
was founded about 21 years ago,
focused on transforming and
redefining what manhood really means,
because we believe that
a lot of what the gender norms around
masculinity underpin a lot
of outcomes that we're trying to prevent.
Many of the things that we
believe in including following,
that men come in with diverse forms and identities,
as do women do.
They are not a homogeneous group.
That violence is not something that is
biologically determined, but socially learned.
A lot of our programming
is also inherently gender-transformative,
meaning it part of our programming being to critically
challenge and redefine our harmful gender norms,
and I'll talk a little bit more about that as to
how that plays out practically in the field.
We also believe that gender is something that we
learn by interacting with the environment around us.
So we have to ensure that our progress
takes that into reality.
Then also that we
believe that gender intersects with other forms of
oppression and that many of our culture [inaudible].
The Overseas Development Institute,
a couple of years ago, released a report looking at
factors promoting or inhibiting
women's economic income and they released
a report about 2016.
It looked at both indirect and underlying factors around
the women's economic profit or direct factors are related
to women's individual and collective experiences,
and underlying factors related to
the wider structural challenges that women face.
As Dr. [inaudible] said earlier,
the lack of recognition and value with
unpaid work and care work
continues to ensure an inequitable division of labor,
particularly in the economy,
and constraints women's participation,
in the labor force in addition to
all the other direction vectors that you see listed here.
When it comes to the underlying factors,
we also see that gender norms
and discriminatory social norms
that see men as providers and
women as nurturers and carers,
or future nurturers and carers also
inhibits women's participation in
paid work and then context.
This is further reinforced at
the institutional level where we
see only maternity leave policies,
for example, being promoted by governments.
Religious bodies that make women's
paid work to actually adverse outcomes for children,
and we know that it is very much not the case.
So if we don't take into account
these really invisible and also
visible gender and equitable constraints,
we can only go so far.
In general, women's economic empowerment programs
do increase access to information,
to technology, and of course,
to sources of income.
But far fewer of them seem to
complement such strategies
with gender-transformative ones,
meaning programs that see power and
gender inequality as a critical root cause
of women's economic disempowerment.
If they do, they don't often look
at the relational aspects of this,
particularly at the household level.
So what are the consequences of this?
When we don't take into account
a more complete or holistic view
when we design our programming or conduct research,
to take into account, understand it's a patriarchy,
and as well as men's roles as potential partners in this.
We often see the continued perpetuation
of the female double burden,
where women are now responsible for earning an income,
as well as continuing to provide
or shoulder the bulk of doing domestic work.
We also see that household decision-making will
continue to be dominated by men.
So many women's economic empowerment programs
like keep on access to resources,
but not necessarily the agency and control to decide how
financial resources are saved in best and spent.
We also see, as was mentioned earlier,
that in some cases,
what men's roles and identities are so wrapped up
in this role of being an economic provider,
this can sometimes create tension at the household level,
sometimes leading to violence.
Then many programs and actually unintentionally
reinforcing some of the inequitable norms,
linking women's economic empowerment programs
to other kinds of caregiving roles,
making them solely responsible for children's nutrition,
maternal, newborn and child health.
As shared earlier, Promundo is
an applied research organization to
better understand men's lives,
their attitudes, and behaviors around
various dimensions of gender and gender equality.
What I'm going to talk a little bit
about is the IMAGES study,
which is the International Men
and Gender Equality Survey.
It's one of the largest, if not the largest, study
of men's lives ever put together.
It's composed of over 200 items.
We borrowed a lot of
indicators from the Norwegian quality of life survey,
as well as the WHO's violence against women surveys,
and it's been applied in over 30 plus countries.
We've interviewed over 60,000 men and women.
It's a mixed-methods study that
is over 200 questions long,
but sometimes shortened depending on what
the outcomes of interests are.
It's often triangulated qualitative research
to better understand specific themes,
depending on the priorities
of the government or the institution that we're
working with at the country
or regional level, and also, why?
Why think of such a study?
First of all,
there are very few studies that actually ask
questions about gender norms, gender-based violence,
household dynamics, childhood experiences,
all in one survey needs to understand
the relationships between all these different things.
The second is that we often ask women about men,
but we don't ask questions to men about themselves.
Then the second is that we also
want to create a baseline to capture
this snapshot as to how men and women view gender norms,
gender equality in their everyday lives,
and hopefully be able to reapply such a survey,
but we are trying to see how dynamics should be.
This is a scary slide.
It hasn't even
included in this presentation.
But all it is is just a framework for
all of the different topics that this survey explores,
from life conditions and how those impact men's
and women's experiences, and their attitudes,
and the gender norms that exist within
their particular segment of society,
and then how those impact or are impacted by
the outcomes of interests that all
of us are more interested in investigating,
whether that's violence perpetration, health,
family, caregiving roles, and dynamics.
Just a couple of pieces of
data from some of these surveys
that we've been conducting over the past 11 years.
One of the key areas that we polled is around
attitudes related to household tasks
and other conditions of labor.
This is a quick snapshot of some of
the countries from a Sub-Saharan African region,
looking at women's and men's
attitudes towards caregiving tasks.
These are not nationally representative samples,
but rather provides an interesting look within
countries on how men and women view their roles.
The question here is changing diapers,
giving children a bath,
feeding children should all be a woman's responsibility.
You can see a pretty significant proportion of men and
women agreeing or strongly
agreeing with such a statement.
We also did this study in the Middle East of
North Africa region with support from UN Women.
What we found, though not unique to
this particular part of the world, is that paid work is
an intrinsic part of men's identities,
as I said before.
When they are unable to find work,
they can feel a sense of shame, stress, and worry.
It can be somewhat easy to see why some men, not all,
would question why
women's economic empowerment programs are even
beneficial to their families because they can see a
usurping their own roles as the heads of household.
They still only see
themselves as the primary breadwinner.
On the flip side however,
these studies also show us that
equitable gender attitudes are
associated with a lot of positive behaviors.
You see men with more gender-equitable attitudes
less likely to perpetrate intimate partner violence,
having a greater participation in
household and daily care of children,
participating more equitably in
household decision-making.
Also, that gender equality in
many ways benefits men themselves.
Men who have more gender-equitable behaviors are
much more likely to take care of their own health,
go and seek HIV testing,
they have less delinquent behavior.
How can we create programs that also tap
into men's own self-interests for change,
rather than engaging men as
sort of this usual instrumentalist approach?
From these studies,
we also know that we need to start intervening earlier,
particularly with young men.
In the studies that we have,
with the data that we collected,
we know that men who witness
violence during childhood are
two-and-a-half times more likely to use
violence against a female partner;
and that childhood experiences also do matter
from an equitable perspective,
that men whose partners or men
whose fathers participated more equally in
household work were one-and-a-half times more likely
to do so when they themselves were adults.
How do we shift these norms around masculinity?
Gender transformative approach.
Gender transformative approaches aim to actively examine,
question gender norms and
power imbalances as the heart of that program,
and actively seek to redefine
and change those harmful gender norms.
Practically, that might mean creating safe spaces where
men and women can come together to
talk with one another about what it means to be a man,
what it means to be a woman, and hopefully,
come to a new and better understanding
of how to create peaceful, or non-violent,
or gender-equitable relationships with one another.
We need to start thinking about
women's economic empowerment programs in silos.
We also need to think about how to go beyond
group education, mother care groups,
or rather thinking about how to
engage our participants as
activists who can make a real change in
their communities through campaigning
and other kinds of interventions.
We also know that from
a socio-ecological model perspective,
that gender norms are reinforced
at multiple levels of society,
not just at the individual and relationship,
but we also need to work within our public health system,
with our labor rights organizations,
around how to shift gender [NOISE] norms.
Most of all what the current evidence is really showing
us is that women's economic empowerment programs
that aren't gender transformative are actually
less active than those that are.
What can this look like at the community level?
We did a randomized controlled trial called Program P,
P stands for "padre" or "pai",
which means father in Spanish and Portuguese,
originally developed with our Latin American partners,
but adapted to go along in context.
It was a randomized controlled trial that was done
with over 1,900 participants,
half of which were in control,
half of which were in the intervention.
It was a 15-session intervention.
Half of the sessions were with men alone,
and half of the sessions were with couples,
the results of which have been already published
in Plos One last year,
for those who are interested
in learning more about the study.
But the sessions focused on men,
explored men's own experiences of violence,
their own vulnerabilities, and why
gender inequality is also bad for men.
Through their participation, they'll earn income,
they'll gain new skills or education,
[NOISE] they may reduce their workload,
or we could be looking at
that kind of external environment,
improving services or institutions.
With the goal of increasing agency, autonomy, income,
decision-making power [NOISE], leadership, or confidence.
Measurements often takes place through surveys,
sometimes some qualitative research,
and often it's about counting
the number of women participating.
This framework really follows a very apolitical dynamic.
It's often right at the individual level,
but the period of change is pretty simple,
and with the idea that's it's
a linear path forward that women are going to move from
this place of oppression
to empowerment through a project,
and all of them are going to benefit equally.
I'm going to look at how the rural water project
in Mozambique adopts many of these same frames.
First, just a little bit about
the water project in general,
it was implemented by
the Millennium Challenge Corporation,
a relatively new, large USA organization,
and they worked through compacts.
Mozambique had a compact with rural water project,
which actually a small part of this compact,
and they insisted on installing
600 handpumps into the provinces in Northern Mozambique.
The project was described as
being very participatory, demand-driven.
The idea was to create ownership in the community,
and it was supposed to be
managed by the community as well.
In terms of how they saw gender and women's empowerment,
women's empowerment was not
an explicit goal of the project,
although it was mentioned in many
of the planning documents.
Women were expected to be
the main beneficiaries of the project itself.
In the project documents and talking
with the project implementers,
the starting place for women
that was envisioned was one where
women were occupying inferior social positions.
They were seen as being oppressed by religion,
about half the population is Muslim in this area,
associated with a lot of traditional norms,
and seems to be oppressed by
the task with collecting water,
and also lacking decision-making
empowering tool of the water sources themselves.
Through this project, they hoped to empower
women by involving them on the water committee,
that was supposed to be gender-balanced, and also,
by saving women time,
by locating the water sources closer,
they expected women to save time,
and that time savings would be
converted into income-generating activities.
They hoped to transition women from these domestic roles
into more productive or economic and political roles.
There was also this implicit assumption that
women would adopt some of
the modern behaviors associated
with economically independent women.
This was measured through either
counting the number of women
participating on the water committee,
the number of women attending meetings.
Also by monetizing the time savings,
they are calculating the time savings and
then assigning that an economic value.
How do these expectations, these frameworks,
square with the realities on the ground [inaudible].
In fact, there's a very large gap
between what the private implementers expected,
the way they received gender,
and what is actually happening on the ground.
Because in the north,
in Mozambique, there's actually a matrilineal society.
Women are the ones that control land,
then it's inherited through the woman's side.
Women also have a lot of power in the household,
a lot of power in spiritual spheres of their society.
Although women are the primary water collectors,
gender roles are really seen as very
complimentary in the society.
Men and women make a lot of different decisions.
Men help women in their tasks.
Men and women are farming together,
so this gender division of labor is quite flexible,
and marital relations are marked by respect and support.
Women really control
the traditional water sources and they
see it as a site that has a lot of social value.
The traditional water sources are places where women from
several different communities get
together and they exchange information.
It's a place where they can leave the household,
they can complain about their husbands.
[LAUGHTER] They socialize their children there,
and there's a lot of productive work that also
happens at these water sites.
Women are the ones managing the water.
They determine who can access that water.
There's also a lot of differences between women.
There are socioeconomic differences,
there were political differences
that were very important between
the dominant political party
and the minority party
that determined access to the water.
There's some geographic differences
in the way communities are laid out
that come into play
in the way that the hand pumps are sited.
This is the situation,
the gender dynamics in that book.
Now, I'm going to talk about
some of the outcomes of this project.
You can probably already guess with these gaps developing
that some of these outcomes were unanticipated,
unaccounted for by the project implementers.
I'm just going to highlight a few of those right now.
The first is that by locating
this hand pump in the middle of the town
and by designating a water company to oversee it,
and also to require a payment to use it,
it changed the social interactions at the water point.
It changed the control that women had at the water point.
Women lost that ability
to have a private intimate space around the water source.
Having men on the water committee,
meant that men were now supervising
women's activities and the way
that they use the hand pumps,
rather than that being really a female-controlled space.
Women also lost the ability to
use that space for bathing naked,
where they would go to
the private water site that they would use that
because it was often outside
of town surrounded by vegetation.
Women together, girls, and even young boys,
were able to bath and appreciated
that intimate private space that they did
not have at the public relocated central water.
Second is only a minority of people use the hand pumps in
each community so
these hand pumps were centrally located,
but these were large in very dispersed communities,
so that meant really just the group
within a kilometer around the pumps were using them.
Other people didn't want to pay for
them or couldn't afford to pay for them when
they had closer nearby water sources and
many people actually thought
those water services tasted
better then the hand pumps to begin with.
There was also a sense of
political exclusion from the minority political party.
They didn't feel like they're able to use
the water points and they're
also in no ways represented on the water committees.
You'd have women on the water committees
if they are gender balanced,
so there were six men and six women,
but you'd have women fulfilling
the lowest positions where they're doing
a lot of the daily work,
supervising the water points.
Also forcing people to pay which
negatively impacts some of
their relationships with other women.
They were getting a lot of the labor-intensive work
on the water committee without earning anything.
Nobody on the water committee, men or women,
are getting paid and very few
of the presence of the water committee were met.
The water project was
really framed around this idea
that women would save time,
and this time they would use
to enter income generating activities.
That's the way the project was really
justified in terms of its economic rate of return model,
by monetizing these time savings.
But what I found was that
very few women were using
their time savings to enter income-generating activities.
Most of them were spending more time with their families.
They were happy just to have more time
to participate in community affairs.
They were happy to have more time to rest and relax,
and they also spent more time doing domestic chores.
These activities were those that were
associated with being a good wife and
a good mother in this context.
Women really felt relieved and
proud to be able to perform these duties.
They would use these words,
and in the past,
where the women who were still
using traditional water sources,
especially during the dry season,
walking several kilometers to get water,
it really strained their relationships with
their husband and they felt like they weren't
able to be a good mother also during that time.
We found that the women that were
able to use the hand pumps,
they talked about being
able to bring their husbands bath water.
They talked about being able to serve meals on time,
to ensure that their family
was walking around in clean clothes.
These were aspects that they
brought up as bringing them pride.
They also talked about
having less intimate partner violence,
and more time to farm with their husbands,
more time to also have sex.
These are things that the women brought up themselves,
that I think are often unrecognized or unaccounted for
in a lot of [inaudible].
I think when these outcomes are viewed from
feminist post-colonial lens, several insights emerge.
The first is that we need to critically
examine the frameworks that we're using to
understand gender and women's empowerment
and societies outside of ours.
What values and assumptions
are embedded in our frameworks?
Who are they accountable to?
Where do they focus our attention and
what areas are they lacking?
Which areas might be rendered
invisible by the types of frameworks we're using?
I think a lot of the empowerment frameworks
are grounded in liberal feminist logic that's
very much out of touch with
the experiences that these women
have or have developed in a change.
This western vision of self-reliant,
economically independent woman was not what
motivated the women in that [inaudible].
They saw their lives as being connected to the ancestors,
to their family, to the community,
to men and to other women.
Working within this context is what it means
to be a good wife and a good mother.
Referring back to that earlier conception
of women's empowerment,
that starting place for women,
I think we could do a better job of recognizing and
building from the women's existing knowledge, resources,
and authority rather than defaulting to
these assumptions of the passive verbal woman.
What are these resources
and where is the agency that
women already have in society?
How can we recognize that?
How can we build from it?
Often that means looking in places
where we're not used to looking,
using qualitative methods that
may open up new spaces for seeing these things.
Looking at what's actually happening at
the traditional water-point rather
than assuming it's a place of women's oppression.
Also, in line with what my colleague
was talking about in terms of emotions,
I think we could do a better job
of using people's own words the way that
they're describing development and
change using their own categories,
and looking at how
those emotions really motivate decision-making.
In [inaudible] , there was a lot of talk about anxiety
and shame, also apply to
joy and bringing those more
centrally into the conversation,
especially when we're talking
about monitoring and evaluation.
Now, a lot of African gender theorists talk about
the central role of motherhood
and the importance of being
a good wife and a good mother and what those roles mean.
What are the aspects of those rules that
women do value themselves?
How could we build on
those while not ignoring the constraints
that they do also face in those roles?
Then that leads to respecting
women's decisions and priorities,
even when from the outside perspective,
it may not appear empowering to us,
because women are strategically making solutions within
the possibilities that are
valued and tenable in a society,
but that do not disrupt their critical alliances with
other women and men in that society.
Characterizing [inaudible] , I
believe it's important to distinguish between forms
of change which have been
prioritizing in the feminists in development literature
and forms of change valued by those
whose lives in intervention is seeking to transform.
Without some knowledge of the ways of being and doing
what's realizable and valued by women in that context,
the results of an intervention on
women's lives cannot be predicted.
A couple of final points.
I think a lot of women's empowerment frameworks
do not do a good job of accounting
for ambivalence, contradictions, and trade-offs.
[NOISE] It's not a linear path forward for women,
this modernization trajectory that we imagine,
and something could be lost as well
as gained along this path.
It's hard to make
sense of it from an outside perspective,
that women themselves are often
ambivalent about these changes
that are taking place in their own lives.
Women in this water projects,
they were promoted to
these new public roles on the water community.
But they also had a lot more work and it
disrupted their critical alliances with other women.
While women had water sources closer
that were of higher quality than the hand pumps,
that also meant that when using the hand pumps,
they weren't able to have
those important social interactions at the water point.
They weren't able to socialize
their children to behave the way that they're reduced to.
But what's really interesting is that women
themselves actually
saw these two water sites as being complimentary.
They used the hand pumps because often,
they were closer and they had better quality water,
when they could afford them.
But then also, at the same time,
women are using their traditional water sources to see
women outside of their homes and today, it's do laundry.
Also, traditional water
sites provided women with water security.
So if the hand pumps break down,
they could always go back to
those traditional water sites.
They were very fearful to abandon them after
seeing the history of a lot of failed projects.
This apparent contradiction that we see
both the hand pumps and the wells,
breaks down the straightforward development trajectory
whereby women transition from fast and traditional,
often associated with these traditional water sites,
to empower them longer associated
with a higher level of technology of the hand pumps.
This research shows how women
strategically navigate these spaces.
But it's really these development dichotomies,
between the modern and traditional,
between empowered and oppressed.
But by each of these being
simultaneously in acting or
zigzagging between these two binaries,
revealing a plurality of positions that might be
articulated as feminist from an African perspective.
I think it's important to
pay attention to women's agency and
ability to resistant and negotiate
aspects of development they don't agree with,
that don't suit their interests.
Look at this wide middle ground
between resistance and accommodation,
and the subordinate female and the dominant male.
What is it? What's happening in the middle?
How are women negotiating those decisions?
[NOISE] I think that by focusing on
women's embodied experiences helps raise
these dualistic understandings and brings attention to
women's lived experiences and subjectivities.
The last one I want to make is that this calls for
more locally grounded frameworks
and indicators who are thinking
about women's empowerment,
based on local ideas of success and
the motivations and the possibilities
for men and women in a given context.
There also needs an interrogating our own frameworks,
and looking at what might be missing?
What are the gaps, the silences?
Who is not being seen in these frameworks?
What might be escaping these filters that
we're all carrying with us and to
understanding a certain situation?
Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Thank you, Dr. Houweling.
Have you been taking questions, [inaudible]?
Raise your hands when it's time of questions,
you can take questions from everybody.
[NOISE] Keep your questions and your answers
short so we can [inaudible].
Thank you, Doc, really for your talk and questions today.
I'm wondering could they just tell us what
is problematic about gender sensitive
as opposed to gender transformative,
and I'm also wondering if you could just comment
on some of the other possible reasons
that the women continue to do
more work when
the men's participation in productive chores,
besides the idea they
[inaudible]
[NOISE] [BACKGROUND]
Hi. My question is for Jane following
[inaudible] question.
Do you think that men are reporting
[inaudible] whereas the women were actually [inaudible]?
I wondered if this regarded [inaudible]
because we have seen a lot of
research projects [inaudible] completely
transformed the gender rules.
A similar project in Uganda may not
have the transformative results that this one has.
I have a comment for Emily and
also a question for Jane. [inaudible].
Who are you? Introduce yourself.
Sorry. My name is Debra Reuben.
Director of Cultural Practice.
[inaudible] Is that better?
Yeah.
According to Emily, I think
her work was very interesting. It is based in
one locality [inaudible] a lot of other
work that has been done
historically [inaudible] many of the same issues,
which were then criticized as you then saw
a shift to a need and desire for
comparative quantitative work that
led to things like going
to environment and maintenance,
to be able to say something
about what is common [inaudible].
It's something you might want to think about in
terms of continuing to work on
this topic about how [inaudible]
have and think about what they
mean for framework which
are usually meant [inaudible] was
very interested in education
and really interested in information
about how much [inaudible] change.
But I felt like I needed to
hear a little bit more about how that
actually related to various measures
of women's economic power.
We talked about that decision-making and other aspects
of empowerment that are not
specifically the economic empowerment.
Whether we're going to use
wholesome kinds of measures
that everyone [inaudible] or whether we're going to use
other measures of women's economic empowerment.
It would be real nice to hear more about power
those [inaudible]. [BACKGROUND] [NOISE]
To the first question on gender
sensitive [NOISE] and is
it an approach that's problematic?
For those of you who aren't familiar,
there is this continuum that's known in the gender field,
where we look at a range of different kinds of programs
starting from gender exploitative programming,
which are actually programs that can reinforce
harmful gender norms in
the places where those programs are being implemented.
Can you hear me okay?
Then they go to gender neutral,
gender sensitive, and then gender transformative.
There's nothing wrong with
gender-sensitive programming at all.
Oftentimes we define gender-sensitive programming
as looking at and
recognizing that gender inequalities
exist in the context where we're working,
and seeks to develop programs and
services that aim to close the gap.
For example, in some cases that might be
providing direct services to
survivors of domestic violence,
gender-sensitive programs are important.
It's just that there are some cases where
gender-sensitive programming doesn't go one step
further in interrogating why
those gender inequalities exist in the first place,
and how they can be transformed.
The second question around
other reasons why women's time of
unpaid work stays the same.
Besides various hypotheses that we
discussed as a team around
maybe women are spending more time supervising,
maybe they're spending [NOISE] more time
with other kinds of
unpaid tasks they couldn't do before.
Other things that we thought about
were other kinds of possible technologies that
aren't necessarily accessible to
the families that we were working with.
Cook stoves and other kinds of
renewable technologies that can
actually reduce the time burden on women.
But we'd love to hear other people's ideas as
to why that might be the case.
The question around, are men reporting,
doing more care work is that it results in
a social desirability bias
[NOISE] could absolutely be
that you go through this intervention,
you learn that in this program,
the facilitators want to hear that
men who do more care work are better men.
That's why we always in our evaluations seek to
triangulate those findings not
just from men's performance,
[NOISE] but from women.
We did a pretty good job, I think,
of interviewing women whose partners
were in the program and just
made it through the program themselves.
We were able to corroborate some of those findings
around men spending more time in care and
not getting other kinds of unpaid work.
However, we can say
pretty consistently across all countries when doing
cross-sectional studies that men
tend to overestimate the time that they spend on
unpaid work [LAUGHTER] and women tend
to give a much different reality from their perspective.
[LAUGHTER] So we'll say that.
Then the question around is Rwanda a unique case?
Yes, absolutely.
We had retention rates of
98-99 percent for both men and women.
That is almost unheard of in
our particular experience just
because there are lots of barriers to participation,
lack of interest in the program, etc.
But what we have been able to see in other kinds of
pilot studies that utilize the same methodology,
particularly in Lebanon, we have seen
similar decreases in not only violence against women,
but also violence against children and the ways that
those intersect and overlap.
But it also has a lot to do with
the quality of the implementation as well.
In other places where
similar gender-transformative programming
has been implemented, the facilitators aren't often
monitored or trained and have
all kinds of variability with regard to
the quality of the implementation.
That's something that's really important to think about.
I struggled to include all of the different pieces
that I wanted to talk about in
a short presentation around men's involvement in
women's economic empowerment programs.
You're working with [inaudible]. Yes. You're absolutely
right that participation in caregiving,
to what extent does that have an impact
on women's economic empowerment.
There have been other studies
by raise the Sexual Violence Research Initiative,
which have done larger meta-analyses looking at how
gender transformative programs combined with
conditional cash transfer programs actually do
have a significant impact
on women's economic empowerment.
This is not necessarily something that we
have done from a randomized control trial perspective.
We did a small [NOISE] pilot program
called Journeys of Transformation
with CARE International,
which found that men who participated in
a women's village savings and loans programs,
those families tend to have
a higher income than those that didn't,
and also greater shared decision-making.
But that's just a pilot, so can't necessarily be
transferable interests of findings to other settings.
You can call for a question that's not for Jane.
Give her a beak.
Yes, I have one question.
I'm Dominic from Kenya and I
have a question for Jane, sorry, once again. [LAUGHTER].
Go ahead.
How do you find working for you,
especially the faith perspective
working with faith community and
religious society in finding
the root causes of gender-based violence?
Also, what composes masculinity?
It is very critical to engage
men in working for women empowerment.
I'm working with the religious community.
I would like to hear
the best practices that is working for you. Thank you.
It does sound a little bit
from a program development standpoint,
how can we incorporate
those concerns financially in some of our programs?
The second part of that question is,
how did you measure or what
indicators are you going to pass
for participation? Thank you.
Hi, my name is Katie Mcnamara.
I'm from the UF, University of Florida.
My question is mostly for Dr. Van Houweling
that my research requires
a lot of the findings on the ground voices,
but definitely not over the course of 10 years.
Can you hear me?
Is this better? Do you hear anything?
[BACKGROUND] I'm wondering if index misalignment that
you've noticed between development priorities
and the community especially
around the conceptualization of environment.
Have you seen any shifts
in the ways of knowing or the ways of
conceptualizing the environment within the field
that could potentially be maladaptive for the community?
What are the potential impacts of that?
Let me answer this last question here.
Then I do want to say that we'll be doing time limit.
We're going to go four till 3:50
and then we have a 10-minute break
and then we'll have shift and share for
an hour before we go to the question session.
[NOISE]
I'm not D. Ruben [LAUGHTER]
even though I'm participating for her.
[LAUGHTER] I'm Beth Moore
from the International Code Association.
The comment for Emily,
I really enjoyed the presentation,
especially the depth of information.
I'd like to share a couple
of other comments that we've heard to
commandeer this morning about
the shape of development still,
especially the big donors who bankroll MCC still having
a traditional sense of
modernization that development should be about
increasing GDP rather than a decline of
social transformation or some greater volume
on equality between all small groups.
I don't think there'd be anyone in this room
that probably participated with
your assessment that tomorrow
and interventions that are designed by people
in offices and not having to look at reality on
the ground are problematic.
I would just like to invite
the discussion to how it can be as
interest in participants includes
the actual work on the ground,
all these large and powerful entities.
Is this on? Thank you for those questions.
We'll try and address them.
I did set up a bit of a strawman argument we're talking
about women's empowerment, that framework.
I think there's many organizations that have
much more sophisticated globally grounded
ideas of empowerment,
so that was a bit of a strawman
argument that was based on
NCC's projects and some of
these dominant ideas about women's empowerment,
and I think there are many organizations
that have more complex analysis on gender sharing.
Today, it's fun and it's well,
this was a unique situation.
It's a [inaudible] religion society,
there aren't many of them,
and so it really brings into
sharp relief some of these questions about
the assumptions and the values
embedded in our frameworks that, I think,
in a particularly relevant for Mozambique,
but I think they have a lot of accredibility as well,
these questions about, could we be
misinterpreting women's actions or choices?
Are we seeing it from a particular western world point
of view or how might women
be seeing your actions differently?
I am just trying to push that question for us all
to think about our frameworks from that perspective.
It may be more or less of them in different societies,
but also that this idea of ambivalence and trade-offs,
I think is that we could pay more attention
to and in any chance,
there's something lost and that
ambivalence and these contradictions that women
often express internally are usually
not accounted for in the way
that we're thinking about women's empowerment.
In terms of the voluntary involvement
of women and to those question,
and that's a really important one
that there's a lot of
expectation that women will on top of everything else,
it is unpaid labor for NGOs.
Unless you're giving them real skills, education,
or training and transfer
and should take them to new roles,
my belief is that they should be
compensated for the water.
The water can really say that there are doing training,
but it was actually rather superficial.
They didn't allow women to begin
transformative changes in their own lives.
They expected it to give them
income-generating activities yet there was
no training or opportunities open for them,
so you do need to think of opening up
real opportunities for them. I'll pass it up.
Okay. I'll speak to these question, the DMs too.
As I was rereading that particular segment,
[inaudible] thinking about
the conversations that such of these women who were
organizing the conference had two years about
how to structure the process of
how women contexts of the post conference in South Sudan,
where the development industry
is a huge part of the economy there,
and drives employees and many people.
It very much differentiates way as we all know.
It's national development that's done a great deal
more than people's problems
in those countries do without work.
The DMs are in a way to compensate people for that labor.
On the other hand,
these women saw themselves as activists,
organizers, not as development workers.
Part of what they want to track
against was development industry's norms of
the DMs which they want women to
come because they wanted to build
a network of women who were going to push back,
not just against the in becoming of South Sudan,
but also the women of Sudan that will build connections
across marginalized communities in Arab Muslim,
Christian, across the country,
African region,
and so that was part of their thinking but, of course,
it's very challenging to hold
a massive conference especially in a place like Juba
where the conference is not on
every week of development and
where the norms are that you can't excel.
So they've worked very hard to communicate that in
advance and for most women that
was absurd but not for all and it did set
the reality of doing that kind of work.
So one question about working with
religious leaders and combating gender-based violence,
what are some of the best practices?
In our experience working for
the [inaudible] , a lot of religious communities,
faith-based communities are very much invested
in promoting harmony and so it's just religious text.
The prevalence or existence of violence is
a signifier of disharmony.
So working with men as
fathers from a gender-equitable perspective,
speaking to religious leaders who are usually
men from that viewpoint has often been very beneficial.
You just have to be, just a word of
caution that sometimes when
working with male religious leaders
and trying to get them on board,
there is a tendency to speak about gender equality from
a very benevolent sexism perspective,
where men are seen as protectors of women.
So just to be really careful about that.
World Vision, is there, anyone,
from World Vision here by any chance?
Has done lots of really great work on interpreting
religious text into more gender-equitable ways.
I think it's called The Channel is Hope.
I'm not sure if it's available online,
but for anyone who's interested I have contacts,
I'll select them and see if I can give you a copy.
I know that someone also asked
for indicators for participation,
but I didn't quite catch that question.
Then the final one around the compensation for women,
we just created our program.
I think that's a much
larger international developing question.
I think that a lot of the programs that we work
on can actually border on exploitative,
in terms of the amounts of time that we commit
participants to be part of our interventions.
That's something that we have to be better at.
I think another thing is about how a lot of
development programs should also be linked to other kinds
of benefits and services
so that we're not necessarily in silence.
Okay, We have five more minutes.
So if we have one question for everybody,
for everybody to answer,
or a couple if you're brief.
Let's go again and start with the next exercise at 4:00,
and I know everybody wants to take a break.
Hello. My name is Susan Churning,
and I'm a graduate student here at Virginia Tech,
and I have a question for Dr. Van Houweling.
I notice in your presentation,
you said that one of the outcomes
[inaudible] was that there
was minority exclusion to an extent,
I am interested in
understanding more about how to implement
technologies into these communities or
other related communities without
excluding certain groups of people.
So in this case, it would be the minorities
or maybe other community members.
Thank you.
My name is Maria Jones and I am with the Appropriate
Skills Organization Consortium, and I
have a question
for all presentations.
A couple of months ago, Gillete
came up with this ad, a very controversial ad,
about the best man can be,
which had extremely negative reactions,
especially amongst men in the United States.
So what do we know, from all of you, who are promoting
this women's empowerment gender trainings
in these different countries?
What are your thoughts about this?
How do you deal with this, and how do you deal with this
when this is happening in this country too?
Oh, sorry. I'd like to get
an effective answer just because [inaudible].
Can you answer that question?
Sure. I'm not sure how
many of you have seen this Gillette ad.
Google it, and it'll come right up.
But basically, what it talks about is
this men's shaving company that talks
about creating a new vision of manhood,
and has various images of men
challenging this mantra that boys will be boys,
that we need to be better than that, as men.
There was a lot of backlash online about
how this is ruining
and destroying the traditional fabric of manhood
in American society.
It's a great ad if you haven't seen it.
It's really [LAUGHTER]
What we found, actually,
is that the backlash
wasn't as bad as the media made it out to be.
Sure, there were a lot of
vitriolic trolls saying bad things about the ad,
but when you actually ask men
themselves or actually showed the video to them,
they actually thought it was great.
There's a few articles that came out about that how
it receives a lot of negative attention,
and so now there's this perception
that there's big backlash.
But actually, it's not.
We think that that larger signify that
the ideas about men are actually shifting and changing.
We work a lot with Axe and Unilever,
trying to rewrite how they're doing their branding.
It's a great thing, although they're
doing it for the profit.
It's a great thing that they're actually
shifting to the other market.
We see this as a positive thing.
Sure, I'm going to answer the question about
minority exclusion from technology projects.
Thank you for that question.
I think the first step is really
identifying these groups and those
disadvantaged in the procedure of the projects.
As gender experts, we often think about women first,
but gender experts will also
want to think about
all the other groups who might also be excluded,
and sometimes, those groups are not seen.
So thinking about race and tenure status,
and this would be an economic class,
all these other issues that crosscut with gender that
determine access to a particular technology,
and to shape how we think about
management committees
and Google's access to the technology.
That's where we started this.
I can see we've got one question up there,
and actually, that's very disappointing.
Everybody gets to have a question,
and then what we had was two questions.
But then you promised that
you're going to [inaudible] right?
[LAUGHTER]
This one question is for [inaudible].
What is familiar thing about conditional cash transfers
[inaudible] empowering woman and at the same time,
do you think that they should be very specific to certain
office [inaudible] suppose to empower them.
What else do
you think about this stuff?
Hi. My name is [inaudible] ,
and I'm from the University of [inaudible] ,
and my question is for Dr. Faria.
I really shouldn't be
talking because I feel like [inaudible]
but I work with [inaudible]
United States government community,
and that might bring back to them
[inaudible] the United States.
I guess I [inaudible] research and
I wanted to know if you have came up with
a plan or something
that allows you to figure out how to
carry on [inaudible] work.
I just wanted to
[inaudible] Do you plan
to continue to carry on with this work of development,
but also be totally aware of the [inaudible] ?
The question on conditional cash transfers,
I will practice this,
but I'm not a women's economic empowerment expert,
so I apologize if I'm maligning the terminology.
In the studies that we've done,
particularly a conditional cash transfer program,
national programs like Bolsa Familia in Brazil,
we found that, oftentimes,
when they're linked to
women's goals as nurturers and carers,
so women who receive
the cash transfer, and also
have to ensure that their children attend school,
that they receive proper nutrition and all of that,
that that can actually unintentionally
reinforce this idea from an institutional perspective,
that that is women's biological and natural goal.
Providing women access to income,
absolutely, we need to do that,
but how to do that in ways that separate their access to
resources from their natural
stereotyped caregiving roles,
I think that we need to be better at.
In Brazil, we did a small study with a program
with the Bolsa Familia to try and tease that out.
Happy to share that study if you're interested.
Thanks for your question.
It's an important moment.
One thing I can support to know is that
we're almost at the positions,
and that's why [inaudible] willingness embraces useful.
[inaudible] there are ways that you could lose,
but certainly, in other continents incentives
not least in
the higher education system in the US.
US is still going to be on top.
Given the time, that's
specifically feasible within representative students.
The other thing I will say here is that what we
want to do is to move beyond paralysis,
a kind of unproductive,
worrying of kids that
often leads us to move in awful directions.
For me, their platform is work
and queer work, and feasibility work,
so we think carefully about how to do
scholarships that we're in
an ally with, so if you're queer,
to look around and becoming ally,
and all of that entails
a much [inaudible] sense of security [inaudible].
Lastly, I'm just saying that it's not about
not doing the work or not being able to do the work,
it's about doing the work differently.
Here, I think you have to pay attention to history.
It's always constant.
That moves us away
from thinking about the ways that we're different,
to thinking about ways in how, either way,
you don't see ways suppose difference in
working and sensing.
What are the long history,
[inaudible] vision that you're working with,
and spaces that are lenient with the ways.
That helps you think that you need more of
the more complex analysis and be able to do your work,
and you'll feel the urgency into the [inaudible]
Thank you to our first panelists.
[APPLAUSE]