Episode 16: Are Our Strategies Fit For Purpose?

Hi, I'm Aruna Rao, the co-founder of Gendered Work. I just want to thank David Pelleher, who many of you remember was the co-host with me of the Gendered Work podcast for the last 15 episodes. And at the same time, I'm delighted to introduce the new co-host of the Gendered Work podcast, my dear friend and Gendered Work colleague, Joanne Sandler. In the last decade, Joanne and I have done quite a lot of work together. We've developed a feminist leadership program under the auspices of UN Women. We've written several articles on a wide variety of topics, including strategies to advance gender equality in the 21st century and how to address sexual harassment in organizations. Thank you, Aruna. I'm Joanne, and this podcast, as Aruna said, is about how to dismantle patriarchy and the creative ways we're seeing in every part of the world to do that. This year, we want to delve deeper into shifting power dynamics in organizations and movements. We want to explore ways in which we can collaborate to build relationships of trust and collective power, and imagine new ways of organizing how we work together to nurture a human community so that the planet not only survives, but thrives. We're looking for your best ideas. We'll share ours. So please be sure to contact us at gender@[email protected], all lowercase. My question has always been, how do we engage and develop our capacity to challenge power and bring that political analysis and unpack those conversations in a more bold way that brings all the elephants into the room and not ignore them? Recently, Joanne and I were asked to write a paper for a consortium of donors on strategies for addressing gender equality now. What would be effective in this changed context, 26 years after the Beijing conference? So we started to talk about whether strategies that have been tried for many years, like gender mainstreaming and a two-track approach, whether they're still fit for purpose, and if not, what needs to change and why? And so we brought some of our gender or a colleague together to reflect on the trends we're seeing, the contradictions that have emerged, and what we hope are some out-of-the-box ideas for change. This is not a show about gender mainstreaming, and we're not going to debate the merits of a two-track approach or what gender transformative really means. And one of us, guess which one, is actually interested in those questions. But as you say, you want to take us higher. We're talking about this in the context of a very complex ecosystem of organizations working to advance and impede gender equality, and many donor agencies, multilateral agencies and others that have the power to determine who gets what. And at the same time, these same donor agencies and buy-in multilateral agencies are legitimately looking for analysis and approaches that open up new pathways that are fit for this moment. One of the big understandings really right now immediately that struck us both was that there's so many contradictions, both within these organizations, contradictions between what they say they're doing, what they're actually doing, their visions which are usually wonderful, broad, expansive, inclusive visions, and yet what they tolerate within these organizations like sexual harassment and sexual harassment with impunity, we are also talking about international NGOs and donor agencies that are resourced by essentially the current avatar of colonial powers and countries that pursue policies that are quite inimical to gender equality on the one hand, you know, like the weapons trade and our colleagues, Kalyani and Annmarie Gertz and Nasreen Alami, point out some of these contradictions. Many of us who work in organizations or within institutions and so on, this thing that we keep saying, I mean, as part of institutional transformation, one of the big kind of motivators that we used to say is unless you clean up your act inside and create some equality inside, you're not going to be able to even talk about equality outside. So that used to be one book that we try used to and still use with institutional transformation. It strikes me now that we have powerful validation for that argument, because the backlash and the war that we are seeing in the environment outside is actually being replicated in organization. So unless you sort out, unless you face up to and and resolve these wars within the organization, you're not going to be able to do it outside and and resolving the wars inside the institution of the organization will actually give you lessons on how to deal with these things outside. So if we're going to be talking about feminist foreign policy, we really have to be looking at spending on on arms sales and fueling the Saudi empire and all that because it just it all undermines each other if we don't kind of work this through. So the areas where we don't work it through enough are in fact, military peace and security and the other area I would say is obviously neoliberal frameworks and financing for development, where we don't work through the what what it would mean to take a feminist approach to all of this. And so of course there are these big new initiatives around care economies and the governments of Scotland and Iceland, a tiny group have developed this kind of care based or welfare based economy model, which is tiny, but it could be quite interesting. At a moment of COVID when, you know, whether we're talking about conflict, we're talking about economy, we're talking about vaccine, all of that, there are unethical practices in basically spiraled from those countries and from an institution like the OCD that serves to basically deepen that power and that control. And talking about an exercise or an attempt to to be transformative or to unpack that conversation without addressing the political. A lot of us are becoming more and more cynical, like Anne Marie was saying, you know, how can we talk about peace without talking about arms sales that are mainly benefiting certain groups of countries that are maybe the loudest that are claiming to be really concerned about human rights and humanitarian action. So it's this, these contradictions, these fallacies basically that we're dealing with and we're working on transformation of organizations a lot of times unable to engage in the bigger political conversation or avoiding that conversation. So these contradictions, as our colleagues are mentioning, have always existed. They're not new, and they've always been a source of tension. But this particular moment is really bringing them into sharper focus because the moment is a moment of multiple crises and the existential crisis of, you know, the climate crisis. So we don't have the 99 years it's going to take, you know, according to the World Economic Forum to bring about gender equality. We have to look at what we're doing right now and say, are these strategies going to bring about the change we're looking for? You know, what are the fruits of these strategies? And if they're not effective, you know, can we be bold enough to think of new ways of working and new structures of working with them? And can we reframe ideas so that they are more relevant to the moment? So you know, we've been having these conversations, Aruna, with our colleagues at Gender at Work, with Andrea Cornwall, about what if we had focused on dismantling patriarchy instead of gender training? What if we called it violence by men instead of violence against women? That's what Roberta Clark always used to say. It's fought to have the murder of women recognized as Femmicide, which exists on a massive scale. But until you frame that idea of Femmicide, it just seems like random murders. It doesn't have the impact. So you know, it's, the framing is so important. And hundreds of millions of women and girls are at risk, WHO affirmed last week that a third of women and girls will experience violence by an intimate partner or someone she knows at least once in her life, which is a pandemic of enormous proportions that doesn't get called a pandemic. And so it's Anne Marie Guertz, of course, who suggests, for instance, that we call for dealing with inequitable power, gender power relations in the same way that peace negotiations deal with inequitable power between moreing parties. It struck me that on any other issue where there are serious, really serious differences of view and resources and power to be lost by one side, we would be calling this a peace negotiation. We'd be talking about peace talks around gender relations. And we always avoid that because we don't want to talk about a war. We don't want to make it sound like it's a, it's like a, you know, a deadly fight. But it seems to me that there is a lot that feminist institutional work could learn from peace and security in terms of negotiation around power sharing and wealth sharing. And I don't know exactly where I'm going with this, but, you know, even thinking, Sudarshan and I have been working on this project on gender parity at the UN and thinking about the fact that, you know, the losers don't step away just because they can see the value of doing things better and differently. They don't. They don't. They step away if you give them early retirement and a big package of money. And dignity as well. So it just seems to me that, you know, bringing some of the ideas of, you know, of if we're talking about institutional transformation and we're very vague about that, and you know my feelings about that, maybe we need to say, well, we need to maybe bring in some things about compensating the losers or power sharing that gives a dignified exit to the people who are going to lose. So that was another thought about kind of bringing in a big idea about peace negotiations into what we mean by transforming power politics. You know, it's not a technical project. It's a political project. Any political project is a negotiation. That's what strategic planning is all about. It's negotiating and realizing that, you know, there's going to be people who are unhappy and they have to be dealt with. We have no illusions about the backlash that this is going to provoke and we need to anticipate the backlash and we need to be really smart about our strategies to be able to be able to carry this forward. Yeah, in a way, which understands the war and the war metaphors, but doesn't feed war. You know, there's that, you know, that tension about how do we talk about these things in ways that now enable us to really shift our own paradigms around. Why do we think what we're doing is going to save the planet? I think that's sort of at the level and how if we collectively allow patriarchy to continue to take us down this road, it's an existential threat, not just for the patriarchs. They're taking us all down, right? We're all going down together and that's what this fight is about. So our colleague Rex Files just talked about backlash and we know it's growing. Mamarie earlier spoke about how that backlash is really ferocious when it comes to challenging notions of the family, the traditional patriarchal family, and the inclusion of genders, you know, beyond the binary male/female. And we know this backlash is growing and particularly in places where it's also combined with neon nationalist agendas and many countries in the world and many of the big prominent countries in the world that in fact were supporters of gender equality like Mexico, like India. You know, I have really fallen in Brazil, which was this wonderful experimental, you know, place, laboratory for all kinds of participatory community-based approaches, and I've really fallen under the clutches of this kind of new, you know, hegemonic systems. So there are contradictions, there's this backlash, but I think there are also new opportunities. One has to hope that there are new opportunities. I think there are new opportunities and a real debate. We need to have a real debate about, you know, whether power relations have in fact changed or not. So many organizations now are using the language of transformation. But what does that mean really? It hides the fact that gender power dynamics are pretty much intact and these so-called transformatory strategies don't deal with the political and economic contradictions that we spoke about earlier. So I'm using like the concept of status in class. It's much easier to change class things like, you know, I don't know, access to jobs or maternity pay. It's so much easier to change that than it is to change abortion rights, for example, or marital rape, you know, things that really affect men's status and the status hierarchy. Those are so hard to change. And I felt like it would help if we acknowledged that if we say, look, the more successful we are at changing men's power and the status hierarchy, the more ferocious the backlash has been. The backlash is real and it's terrible. And I just finished reading a paper about gender equality agencies in Europe. And it says that the backlash that they inspire intensifies to the degree that they include intersectionality in what they do. So the more they address gay rights, the more they address trans, the more intense ferocious and like profound the backlash is. The ferocity of the backlash is not the reason not to pursue gender equality and, you know, sexual rights regardless of your sexual orientation and sexual characteristics, right? So we tend to use words like intersectionality as a way to kind of mask what we're talking about almost. But I feel like, you know, we should just be straight about it, which is like the deeper we go down this route, the worse it's going to get in terms of backlash. And we need to confront that and figure out why is that considered to be such a profound existential threat? I agree completely with Anne-Marie, what Anne-Marie said about intersectionality. I think we've fallen into the trap of formulating it as overlapping or, you know, different hierarchies that happen to come together. Whereas the original point that was made when the notion was first floated, Kimberley Crenshaw herself has said it in various ways, but somehow it's not got across to the development world. They're not overlapping hierarchy, I mean, that vulnerability and that exclusion is actually co-created by all these hierarchies together. So it's a political process of placing a person in a particular location. That location is not defined by just that the hierarchies cross there, but that location is actually created by the hierarchies working very intentionally and actively together. So how can we think of strategies like that? The thing that I think about a lot I do is our own practice and the fact that, you know, we have grown up and been socialized in societies that are patriarchal. We fall into patriarchal traps all the time. We live in neoliberal realities, right? And I still think that there isn't enough reflection, research action on that. So it was important that Sudarshina, the co-executive director of Gender at Work, brought us back to that question of our own practice, which in many cases is the only thing we actually have some real power over, and she reminded us that the challenges of decolonization or neoliberalism aren't out there. They are in our everyday practice in organizations like ours, just the way they are in large patriarchal institutions. So when we talk of a decolonization, we also have to think about what does that mean in terms of reparation and changing power structures, ways of working, all of that. And again, that's not something that we kind of really engage in. The other thing that we don't kind of engage in, and something in terms of the paper, as we talk of neoliberalism as a way that it's out there, right? It's very much a conversation out there. But neoliberalism in the way that we function, in the way that we work, in the way that we engage with Philanthrop capitalism, and the way that, say, the OECD DAC net actually kind of engages with Philanthrop capitalism is not kind of interrelated. Even when we're talking about the deep structures and informal power dynamics, we still have not found a way to bring that sophisticated, more complex discussion where the resistance is happening. And maybe I wouldn't call it neither resistance nor backlash, right? There's always, these are competing frameworks that we are dealing with. And the more powerful are always one step ahead. There is a great deal of rethinking going on now, whether it's, you know, say the approaches that say, is exemplified by the World Bank's strategy on working with women, which is really focused on looking at the conditions of access of women to resources, to productive resources, which in a way harkens back to the 1970s, which were focused on women and women in development. And partly that's a, it's a smart strategy because the resources for this work always seem to be very limited. And so, you know, it, this focuses your attention on women and the conditions to, you know, conditions that enable them to have resources, to have voice, to participate. And of course, for so many years, and this is a lot what gender at work has been doing as well, is, you know, what Myerson and Scully back in 1995 called temperate radicalism and Fiona McKay has, has written recently about that, you know, basically working with feminist principles within institutions that we know are patriarchal, and try to find spaces within those institutions for something new to emerge, right, Eric Olin, right, our favorite Marxist sociologist, you know, talks about this as well, he also says, you know, interstitial spaces, and those spaces have can have transformative potential. And Srila Roy also, who's written about this more recently, the Indian academic who's now currently based at, at the University of Woods, Waterstown in South Africa, uses this term, the practice of moderation, you know, to bridge these polarities in feminism between radical and, you know, the sort of feminism is dead, and has been co-opted kind of ideas. And she too says that, you know, the practice of moderation, because it's unstable, it's open ended, it has the potential to bridge these polarities, and it enables a kind of, you know, daily enactment of feminist politics. There is that on the one hand. And then on the other hand, you know, there's a question that we started with is like, you know, are we just appeasing this monster called patriarchy, or are we going to cut off its head? I mean, I'm for cutting off the head. And I think you are too, the American Egyptian journalist, Mona Atahawi, describes patriarchy, which I love as the head of an octopus, and talks about how everything else, racism, sexism, rapacious capitalism, homophobia, ableism, and other curses are its limbs, right? And so if you keep the head intact, then it just keeps surviving every attack on the limbs. And, and I think, you know, reflecting back on these 25 years since Beijing and before, but just, you know, in that period, a lot of the strategies that emerged, like gender mainstreaming, gender training, gender analysis, countless hours spent on gender strategies, et cetera, et cetera, which, you know, I completely bought into too. I think they have been distractions, they haven't delivered. And so are we going to focus our attention now on the head, or keep working on the limbs? Because we fall for it every time, so 12,000 years after centuries of uprisings and genocides and inequities, patriarchy remains relatively unscathed. And actually, I was just reading something by Aldefacio from Costa Rica, who was saying in an article on patriarchy, you know, patriarchy started somewhere, so it can also end somewhere. And so that's the question, right? Where and when does it end? And is our work and gender and institutional change going to contribute to that end? Or are we helping to sustain it? So thanks for listening. We hope that you're one step closer to dismantling patriarchy and Aruna. And we'd really like to hear about the innovative and challenging things you're doing to create cultures of equality. So please contact us at [email protected], all lowercase one word, and let us know what you're doing and tell us your comments on what you've been hearing. Thanks so much. [BLANK_AUDIO]