Gender Issues
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The organizer of the community tree planting project in rural Kenya could now see why the project had failed. For months, he could not figure out why all the seedlings were dying. Finally, a couple of women from the village had come to him and explained. 'You see,' they said, 'you only talked to the men here, and they wanted only those kinds of trees that they could make money from. We are the ones who carry water from the stream to the village, and we are the ones that take care of small plants in the village, so the men expect us to carry extra water needed to water these seedlings.' They explained that they needed different species of trees to build their houses, to burn for cooking, and to grow fruits and other food, so why should they water these trees?
The concerns of women had gone ignored, and without their support, the seedlings died. The project organizer thought to himself, 'I didn't know that women had anything to do with forestry. I should have asked them, and I should have included them in our planning meetings. Now we will have to start over. We will make sure that the women have a say in the project.'
What is gender?
Sometimes people think that "gender" means "women," or that taking a gender perspective means working with women. Yet, gender is not just about women. It is also about the roles of men, and about the relationships between men and women.
Gender is a term that is often confusing for people. How is gender different from a person's sex? Gender refers to the culturally defined aspects of being a woman or a man, whereas sex is the biological state of being a male or a female. This is important, since gender changes over time and culture and is, therefore, variable. Sex is biologically determined and, therefore, is largely fixed. Gender roles are those activities that are considered by a given culture to be appropriate to a man or a woman, or to a boy or a girl.
This is clearer when you think about the perceptions in different parts of the world about behavioral norms for men and women. Take, for example, a woman who decides what town the family should live in, or a man who feeds, bathes, and cares for the children while his wife works outside the home. The man is a man and the woman is a woman, no matter if they are in the rural highlands of Bolivia or in Geneva, Switzerland. Yet, in one place, their behaviors may seem very normal, and in another many people would find these behaviors to be strange, because they do not follow the gender norms.
What does gender have to do with conservation?
Roles and responsibilities:
In many places around the world, men are more likely to work solely outside the home and engage in commercial activities, while women are more likely to work both inside and outside the home. Women often hold primary responsibility for feeding families, cultivating subsistence crops, managing households, and educating children. As a result, women's and men's priorities, roles, and knowledge often differ, and they often experience the impacts of environmental degradation differently. For example, the women in the story above are similar to most women around the world who have the task of collecting water. With greater deforestation and soil erosion, sources of water may move further and further away from people's homes, making women's jobs harder and giving them a direct stake in watershed conservation. Meanwhile in the same situation, men, who are more likely to gather natural resources for commercial activities, may have to go further into the forest for timber, and their priorities for conservation may relate to those species that bring a good price in the market economy.
Access and decision-making power:
Besides differing roles and responsibilities, in many places, men and women have different access to and control of natural resources. In the Dominican Republic, a community conservation project had to deal with the fact that men and women even use and control different parts of the same palm tree!
Land tenure has been shown to be essential for motivating households to make productivity-enhancing investments in their fields. Giving women control of agricultural products for household consumption and cash income has, in some cases, shown to improve productivity. For example, one study estimated that output from the same area of land could be increased by as much as 10 to 20 percent if household plots were not just worked by women, but also controlled by women (Udry, et al. 1995).
In some cases, involving both men and women in planning meetings may not be enough to get men and women to participate equally. In a coastal resource management project in Maputaland in South Africa, women were too shy to speak in front of men at meetings, and the men were opposed to the women forming their own project groups. However, the project managers had already investigated the power dynamics between men and women and realized that they would have to build a rapport with the women apart from the men. The women did start their own activities tending tidal zone resources that provide daily sources of food, and after the men saw the benefit to their communities, they began to value the women's groups. The project managers hope that as women's awareness of their contribution grows, that they will begin to have more confidence in meetings where men are present. Such confidence building also translates to the next generation of women-the adolescent girls in the community-and the value given to women's work is also seen by the teenage boys, thus leading to new perceptions and gender roles over time.
In this case, it was helpful and necessary to form separate groups of men and women in order to manage different project activities. Such separation is sometimes not the best solution, as it can further alienate people from each other and create rifts within the project. Conservation practitioners can often seek assistance and advice from the community itself as well as from other technicians in the health or education fields to decide what is best to try and then manage adaptively. In many cases, separate groups of men and women focus on different activities within a project and then come together in a general assembly format, for example, to make joint decisions on the overall project.
Isn't this just for Gender Specialists?
There are times when a project would benefit from the expertise of a gender specialist. However, the differences and relationships between men and women have to be taken into account at every step of the project cycle , and by learning to see men and women through a gender lens, you will improve your conservation outcomes even without the help of a specialist. This includes being sure to disaggregate your project data by gender (e.g., how many women and men participate in a training workshop, or how many women receive loans as part of the agroforestry credit program). Projects can also benefit by being attentive to both the quantity as well as the quality of participation by different gender groups. For example, it could be just as important to count the number of women and girls who come to a community meeting as it is to make sure that they are able and willing to actively participate by having their voices heard and their votes counted.
The tools presented here are for anyone who works with people in natural resource management and conservation, whether those people are men, women, or both. We also need to keep in mind that attention to gender issues is a crucial component of how we as conservation practitioners think and act in our own organizations. As we seek to foster gender awareness and equality in our partner communities and projects, we should do the same within the staffing, planning and evaluation processes of our home institutions. This 'institutionalization' of gender within projects and organizations is a key step towards creating more equitable and transparent societies for all.
Fortunately, the example given above in the Kenya tree planting project had enough funding to recover from the mistake of ignoring gender. Many other projects that fail to consider the differing priorities, roles, and knowledge of women and men do not survive. While addressing gender issues in conservation may seem to complicate a project, it will have a significant impact on whether your project fails or succeeds.
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