Women’s empowerMENt: How do large-scale development agencies approach men and masculinities in gender-based project programming and women’s empowerment initiatives?

Due to the work of many critical and feminist scholars and development practitioners, gender assessments and strategies have been mainstreamed into the work of large-scale development agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Gender as a concept within the development paradigm has shifted over time from a focus on integration of women into development projects (women in development, WID), to the examination of gender as a social construct that includes specific roles, norms, and responsibilities assigned to men and women (gender and development, GAD), and ultimately to empowerment approaches that emphasize the need for transformational change of the social and institutional structures that subordinate women. Contemporary discourses and critiques within the field of gender and development bring to the fore the importance of understanding how intersectionality and masculinity operate within these greater systems and structures. In this research project, I use critical feminism and document analysis to examine USAID's gender strategies across 60 nations and regions and how they approach gender and development in terms of men’s unique needs, men’s role in women’s empowerment, and the role of masculinities in men’s performance of gender. Preliminary results show that USAID's gender focus is almost entirely on women's needs with very little work being conducted on masculinity, particularly in terms of the way men identify themselves as "men" or "masculine" and how this influences initiatives targeted to women.