Men, women, and organisational culture: perspectives from donors

Anne Coles

For many gender advocates, progress towards gender equality and gender mainstreaming since the UN Fourth Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 has proved disappointingly slow. This paper proposes one strategy to help further progress: namely to involve more men as gender specialists in bilateral development organisations and to involve them fully in mainstreaming processes. The aim of the paper is to highlight the need for both men and women in donor organisations to be fully involved in advancing the position of women, if development goals are to be reached. It begins by looking at the progress that has been made in promoting gender equality in the work of bilateral development organisations since Beijing. I consider the special case of the way in which gender has been mainstreamed in the British government's Department of International Development (DFID). I then examine the respective advantages and disadvantages of men and women taking lead responsibility for gender issues. And I conclude with suggestions for the future.

I am basically drawing on experiences of DFID and on the recent research that I have been undertaking as an associate at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women at Queen Elizabeth House in the University of Oxford. I want to acknowledge the help of both men and women gender specialists, working at policy, programme, and project levels, who generously shared their views with me.

The context

In 1996 the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD published an important strategy document: 'Shaping the 21st Century: The Contribution of Development Co-operation'. The document selects targets for the bilateral donor community to aim for by 2015: halving the number of those living in extreme poverty; universal primary education; reducing infant mortality by two-thirds; reducing maternal mortality by three-quarters; universal access to family-planning methods; and reversal of trends in the loss of natural resources. The indicator (or proxy measurement) for the empowerment of women is a limited though critically important one: to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education. The transformation in gender relations and the gendered re-distribution of resources needed to achieve these targets seem initially to have passed largely unnoticed. But they present an enormous challenge to the development community as a whole.

Progress since Beijing

I have recendy been helping to review how the countries that are members of the OECD's DAC have implemented their 1995 policy statement on gender equality, which was a contribution to the Beijing process. All members have made progress, but the advance has been uneven, both across organisations and across the nine goals of the Statement. It has varied according to the 'baseline' positions of the development organisations concerned, the flexibility of their institutional structures, their priorities, and the total resources available. In no development organisation, either ministry, government department, or agency, has the strategy of gender mainstreaming been fully established, and none has reached all the goals. Advancing gender equality is proving to be a much slower process than many originally expected. Much remains to be done; and it can only be done, I suggest, by involving men much more fully than hitherto.

The adoption of a mainstreaming strategy involves taking gender considerations into account throughout the work of the organisation concerned. From this it follows that advancing gender equality becomes the responsibility of all staff — men, who are usually in the majority, as well as women. This is very different from the earlier Women in Development (WID) approach, which typically found expression in small female-staffed gender cells devoted to projects on women's issues. Indeed it was because of the limitations of these units as agents for change, and their marginalisation, that gender-mainstreaming strategies have been adopted in a majority of donor organisations. Gender units are still needed to act as advocates and catalysts, to lead on policy, to provide expertise, and to support technical departments. But in order to gain the commitment of a much wider body of professional and administrative staff, both men and women gender specialists are needed.

Preliminary remarks

Any consideration of the effectiveness of men and women in championing gender policies must take institutional aspects into account, including the following.

• The culture of the development agency in which they work is critical: its mandate, which determines how gender policies will 'fit', its norms and values, its formal structures, and (especially important) its informal working behaviours, which may be very powerful. The extent to which the organisation is directed by parliament varies, but the political agenda can be important. For example, there were powerful statements in Scandinavian parliaments following die Beijing conference, and in Britain the Labour government's 1997 White Paper (official policy document) on aid, 'Eliminating World Poverty: A Challenge for the 21st Century', has had a major influence in DFID. Organisations are also variously vulnerable to other external pressures, such as lobbying by civil-society groups.

• Those working overseas need to take account of the structure of local society, the nature of partner organisations, the leading personalities and, at the level of the field, the culture of the population to be reached.

Gender is, of course, only one aspect of a person's identity. Other aspects such as ethnicity and class are also important, and gender cuts across them, often in complex ways.

• Being 'part of the modern world', affluent, or a foreigner may be more important factors than gender in the conceptual gaps that exist between the development professional and the target beneficiaries.

• Age can be critical. Both men and women working on gender equality need to hold senior positions in their organisations in order to be taken seriously. They often...